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Tavarus Calamia
For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilisation properly speaking. Civilisation meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriarchy, slavery) but also made possible written literature, science, philosophy and most other great human achievements.
The conclusion from this is that the way forward to sustaining and increasing the well-being of large segments of population is not to abolish government, but to evolve institutions that keep bureaucrats working for the benefit of the population, rather than themselves.
Graeber and Wengrow employ here an old and highly effective, but intellectually dishonest rhetorical device. They present the reader with a caricature, and then associate it with authors who actually say quite different things. Ian Morris, for example, is hardly a Rousseauian. Just read his War, What Is It Good for? Not that I necessarily agree with everything he says (see this blog post).
A dismal conclusion, not just for anarchists, but for anybody who ever wondered if there might be some viable alternative to the status quo. But the remarkable thing is that, despite the smug tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence. There is no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian, or that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or bureaucracies. These are just prejudices stated as facts.
In the case of Fukuyama and Diamond one can, at least, note they were never trained in the relevant disciplines (the first is a political scientist, the other has a PhD on the physiology of the gall bladder).
Here the Davids actually make a good point. I myself slammed Flannery and Marcus for dragging in Rousseau in an otherwise positive review of their book in the Times Literary Supplement (unfortunately behind a paywall, but the preprint is here).
I doubt that it took one person more than a day to construct a mammoth hut (after you have hunted down and butchered the mammoth, of course). It would take much more time (and people) to eat such a mountain of meat! The difference between one day of work and 300 people-years, required for Gobekli Tepe, is 5 orders of magnitude (365 days/year x 300 people-years = 109,500 people-days). And there is another jump of 3 orders of magnitude from Gobekli to the Great Pyramid. Claiming that the monumentality of a mammoth house is not really different from that of the Great Pyramid is, well, silly.
Indeed, 5 orders of magnitude more astonishing than a mammoth hut. And note that, although the builders of Gobekli Tepe did not practice agriculture, crops such as wheat and barley were already cultivated in areas only a couple hundred kilometers away.
Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organisation. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe.
In fact, there is absolutely no evidence that any large-scale human society can be organized in any other way than hierarchically. We are not ants! (I expand on this theme in the Pipe Dream of Anarcho-Populism)
And of course there was inequality in small-scale societies, but how could one deny the massive increase in inequality associated with the first centralized ones, complex chiefdoms and archaic states?
Pete, this is a big question. If in short, clearly it depends on what kind of public goods we want to produce. Decentralized free market is the answer when there are lots of producers and consumers and no realistic possibility for a monopolist to control it all (or government regulations to prevent monopoly). Small-scale cooperation to manage local irrigation systems, where Big Government would be be worse than useless (Lin Ostrom wrote much about this). For things like national defense we really need cooperation at the level of the whole polity, which requires chains of command. For global problems we need cooperation at the international level.
It seems to me that the Occupy movement was a failure. Its members camped out in a lot of city parks, but the movement pretty much dissipated after those members got kicked out of those parks. They did not even bother to find new gathering places.
The Occupy movement brings to my mind the theory of history cycles proposed by Arthurs Schlesinger I and II. They proposed that US history alternates between liberal and conservative phases, phases of reform and stagnation, of public purpose and private interest, of expanding democracy and containing it. The phases are roughly 15 years in length, though the Gilded Age was a conservative phase that lasted over 30 years, and though we are currently in a second Gilded Age that has lasted even longer.
As to state-like formations in American Indian societies, I really have to suggest examining the Natchez and the Iroquois League. There is a reason the Iroquois were an inspiration for Franklin. And I think the network of trails sharply modifies any picture of American Indians as little bands wandering a wasteland, occasionally meeting at random. (Like the rather foolish recent movie Hostiles.) The career of the great leader Tecumseh shows very clearly there were extensive multicultural influences more like international relations than we may have imagined.. The melungeons and the Mingo also suggest blending, even deliberate in the latter case.
//Without taxes we could have no government, and without government we would have no public goods that it produces, which is what really makes possible high standard of living we enjoy in reasonably well-governed societies (which include Western Europe and North America).//
The main obstacle to this form of decentralized government would be security and law. You still need to pay for the first function of government: a hierarchical authority to administer the laws of the game and protect the community of gofunders from external attack.
The main question is how to maintain security and stop the government which controls it from abusing its power and creating a support base by encroaching into the supply of the provision of public goods.
My point was that festivals like Burning Man are temporary in duration and limited in space. Recurring rather than permanently fixed. Those who carry the badges of authority at Black Rock are regular Joes the rest of the year. The people come and obtain whatever social goods, and everybody departs.
Self-organization implies that useful leadership emerges spontaneously and workers support the organization voluntarily, with a sense of shared ownership; not anarchy! The architect directs the masons, but each mason carves their own gargoyle to taste. Not the same marching in uniform.
The Mammoth hut is a residence which, for its time, is best compared to a spectacular palace than a monumental building. A monumental building is always more than a residence: with its image alone it must express a concept relating to group-identity.
I believe this actually began in the 1980s or 1990s and accelerated with the invention of Bitcoin in 2009 and the rise of Cryptocurrencies and alt-tech over the latter half of the last decade. This movement is political but it is not strictly considered left or right. On the left it appeals to anarchists, on the right libertarians, but there are also centrists who want to use the technology politically. Overall its effect so far has been politically decentralising.
Why do so many people wear red MAGA hats? Donald Trump put a name to a pre-existing Americanism movement. This movement has directly challenged the globalism that has caused a lot of the inequality in the US. Jobs have returned to America under the Trump administration.
Meme-specific movements such as Kek and Pepe have effectively satirised inequality of speech and provided a platform to criticism corrupt political actors. Pewdiepie is a movement unto himself (85 million subscribers) challenging power of big corporations. (T-series channel).
Well. I think there are a lot of attempts to return to a more familiar social concept by group formation. By trial and error.
Obviously the internet offers a new and easy access opportunity for that/ but old and new concepts are overlapping each other, in a way you should be carefull attributing succes and failure parallel to the box they are in.
On the other hand cryptocurrency, how ever big it might suggest to be is nothing more similar too the nerdish experiment concerning avatars at the time, which never landed.
Because it confuses a general software concept: blockchain, with being a currency, as it functions in the economy between supply and demand with a relative secured value.
It is not a currency, but a trading technique.
I guess it got into play because of the parallel beteeen local currencies already used at places/ and technicians living in these places, when the financial crisis happened.
The ponzy scheme speculation on bitcoin in the Chinese stockmarket after that, which drew a lot of speculators in a dead market was confused with a real value.
//Occupy for instance as a mental consciousness movement stretches to the too big to fail concept/ in relation to civilians having to pay for the damage, which still lives on in the political debate about states having to pay for other states debt, as it plays out in Europe and is also related to the US China trade ratio.//
I write about income growth and living standards and you are compelled to reflexively link to a totally separate topic on income inequality. The fact that so many on this web site confuse the two just reinforces the futility of having a rational debate on living standards in this forum.
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