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Ariel Salleh
May 26, 2024, 4:41:32 AMMay 26
to WSM-d...@lists.openspaceforum.net, Radcal Democracy
John Clark
LaTerre Institute for Community and Ecology, New Orleans
This text is a slightly revised version of closing remarks for the 'Deep Commons Conference 2022: Cultivating Ecologies of Solidarity and Care beyond Capitalism, Patriarchy, Racism and the State,’ Cork, Ireland, October 29, 2022
Many good ideas were discussed at the Deep Commons conference. These ideas are not only good; they are also revolutionary. Taken together, they add up to the recipe for a revolution of a certain type, one that we might call, for good anthropological reasons, a “Rehumanization Revolution,” and, for good political reasons, a “Recommunization Revolution.”
Among these revolutionary empathy; collective healing; consensual decision-making; moving from human affinities to inter-species ones; the Necrocene, the new era of death on Earth; disaster anarchism and disaster utopia as responses to social and ecological crisis; somatic healing as a component of political strategy; indigenous traditions of cooperation and care; small-scale social institutions such as communes, superblocks, alternative families, ecovillages, cooperatives; the gift economy; humans as homo donans – the gift-giving and receiving being; the free-giving economy; the abolition of money; the importance of plasticity; beyond resilience, and even regeneration, to revolution; thinking about the seventh generation; revolutionary love, solidarity and care; and, finally, perhaps as important as any of these: the need for Storytelling.
This crucial final idea poses a pressing existential question to us. How are we going to weave together all these ideas into the story that will change the world? How are we going to tell this story?
One way of telling it is, in part, to begin with “the Dawn of Everything,” as is done in a recent, already rather classic work. Explaining “the Dawn of Everything,” might seem a This includes the dawn of things like inequality, hierarchy. and domination, on the one hand, and of things like liberty, equality, and community, on the other. It’s a bit ironic that the authors of The Dawn of Everything caution us against looking for the dawn of certain things, and most notably, inequality.[1]
Yet, the question of “the origin of inequality” is a meaningful one that leads to the even more crucial question of “the origin of equality.” Granted, there is no arkhé of origin, no privileged moment of the beginning of inequality, or of anything else, for that matter. Yet, there are processes of origination of both arkhé and anarkhé, of domination and the foreclosure of free flourishing on the one hand, and of non-domination and the liberation of free flourishing on the other.
The dawning of the latter of these was simultaneous with the dawning of a kind of communal consciousness that is inseparable from the dawning of human language and a humanized and communalized form of communication. Communication, communization, and communing converged in the emergence a Deep Commons, a deep commonality. This is our primordial history, the first chapter of the Human Story. It is a history that is still very much alive, though threatened as never before.
We might conceptualize this Human Story, as an integral part of the Earth Story, in terms of five geohistorical revolutions (or geo-revolutionary epochs) within our human period of geohistory.
The first such geohistorical revolution was the Humanization or Communization Revolution. This Revolution gave birth to symbolic forms such as art, religion, and language, and above all to the egalitarian caring community that nurtured humans and humanization, and was seen as part of a larger, more-than-human, Earth Community, recognized explicitly in concepts of a wider, more-than-human system of kinship. This revolution gave birth to the anarkhic community.
The second revolution, the Agricultural, Patriarchal and Statist Revolution, instituted the society of arkhé, the society of domination and hierarchy, and increasingly established patriarchal domination in every sphere of existence.
The third revolution, the Industrial and Capitalist Revolution, continued the development and expansion of arkhé in every social and spatial direction, and the superimposition of a human-dominated technosphere on the biosphere.
In the fourth revolution, the Cybernetic and Megatechnical Revolution, technological domination becomes increasingly automatized, internalized, and immunized from any critically conscious, reflective, value-based steering by human agents. This is a revolution of domination that makes liberatory revolution almost unthinkable, an absurd and indeed foolish fantasy, as the material conditions for it become more easily assessable.
Revolutions two through four have progressively expanded the realm of domination within human society, over other species, and over the Earth. They have produced the sixth great mass extinction of life on Earth, and the rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, in addition to many other hyper-entropic and ecocidal effects. At the same time they establish nihilism as a hegemonic ideology in the form of a resolute disavowal of the future and the reality of the Earth.
The Fifth Geohistorical Revolution, if it occurs, will be a Rehumanization and Recommunization Revolution. It will consist in the restoration of a non-dominating, egalitarian
One must ponder the fact that in all previous geohistorical revolutions humans did not consciously choose to change the direction of geohistory. Either we did not realize that The next revolution will be the first one in which humanity has been consciously aware of its revolutionary project. It will also be the first revolution based on our acceptance of our being as deeply geo-historical beings.
It is It pointed to the fact that the revolution must be carried out on the level of the person, on the level of groups at many scales of organization (primary and intimate, local, regional and transregional), and on the level of the whole of humanity and the Earth. We might say, it followed the imperative, “Think and act globally, regionally, locally, and personally.”
Such a project will require the ubiquitous and pervasive development of the ability to think critically and dialectically, to feel humanely and communally, and to act collectively and federatively, at all these levels. It will require deep reflection on the nature of preconditions, and on what needs to be done in all spheres of social determination, at the micro, meso, and macro levels. It will require a movement from the goal of prefiguration to one of transfiguration. It will require the creation, step by step, of a rehumanized and recommunized social institutional structure, social imaginary, social ideology, social ethos, and social materiality.
But we are already far ahead of the story. We can refer to “rehumanizing” and “recommunizing” only because there was a Humanization Revolution that was at the same time a Communalization Revolution. Significantly, this first successful revolution was also an anarkhic revolution, because, for it to achieve all its positive goals, the “logic of dominance,” or arkhé, in existing primate society had to be overthrown. This revolution was the first world-historical confrontation between arkhé, or domination, and anarkhé, or free cooperation and mutual flourishing. In it, anarkhé prevailed.
Previous primate societies had been societies of hierarchy and dominance. The alpha males (that is, the arkhic males) were creatures that aimed at monopolizing females while at the same time minimizing their own efforts. The dominant alpha or arkhic male was the major threat to the emergence of the humanized, cooperative community. Consequently, as part of the humanization and communization process, females developed strategies to defeat alpha or arkhic male dominance and to promote cooperative behavior that would protect and nurture the community, and especially its most needy members, its offspring. Such strategies have been conceptualized as forms of “reverse dominance hierarchy.”[2]
Females developed ritual strategies to secure mates who would stay with the mothers and support the offspring’s needs. It has been found that highly symbolic red ochre was used in the earliest such rituals of women’s solidarity and power in many cultures across the world, and versions of such Female Cosmetic Coalitions have continued up to recent times. In these rituals, groups of women concealed the timing of their fertility and ovulation, intimidated the alpha males, and defeated the efforts of these arkhic males to control sex and reproduction. The females thus successfully asserted their collective revolutionary power.
These anarkhic females had an incentive to attract anarkhic, communitarian males who would remain with the family and community and would cooperate in supplying food and care for offspring. Further, non-alpha, anarkhic males had an incentive to cooperate with anarkhic females against alpha male dominance, of which they were also victims. The result was the defeat of that dominance, and the establishment of communal childcare in which human infants were exposed to a variety of human caretakers, including, most notably, grandmothers, who became a key factor in caring for the generations, and thus, in human evolution.[3]
This collective care fostered the ability to recognize and respond to the nuances of facial expression and resulted more sensitive and humane communication. Humans developed what has been called Deep Social Mind, the capacity for reflexive “mind-reading,” that is for mutually interpreting mental states through intersubjective interactions. This depended on another crucial development, the evolution of human “cooperative eyes” that produced greatly expanded capacity for shared attention.[4]
On an evolutionary level, the advances in attention interaction between humanization and communalization and the emergence of complex qualities that further promoted humanization and communalization. In all these aspects, collective childcare or alloparenting (shared, cooperative parenting responsibilities) was central the humanization process. It became part of the basis for a larger caring community in which solidarity and love are generalized in communal practices.[5]
So, this is the primordial revolutionary story, in which anarkhic female coalitions and female alliances with non-arkhic males succeeded in establishing the egalitarian, cooperative community that was the primordial wellspring of the Deep Commons.
For the fascinating details of this story, one can look to the work of the Radical Anthropology Group and to anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Camilla Power, Chris Knight, Sarah Hrdy, Andrew Whiten, and Christopher Boehm.[6]
If this story, in the context of the subsequent history of geohistorical revolutions, makes sense to us, and is well-grounded, we will necessarily see our current role in geohistory as, above all, to move as rapidly as possible into the period of the fifth geohistorical revolution. What, then do we have at our disposal, if we seek to do this?
The first thing we possess is most obviously the indigenous egalitarian, solidaristic, and communal traditions and practices that have survived under the civilization of The strongest evidence for the possibility of something is its actual existence. Many of us have accordingly come to recognize the transformative and liberatory power of the living and thriving indigenous communities that have carried on the egalitarian and communal traditions of that first Revolution. If we knew nothing more than the story of the power of indigenous culture to convert a group of brilliant but ideologically misguided young vanguardist militants into what came to be known as the Zapatista Movement, with all extraordinary social achievements, this would be enough to convince us of this miraculous power.
Perhaps less often recognized is the degree to which the tradition of anarkhé is preserved in the great wisdom traditions of the Axial Age, which were a reaction against the forces of domination that were destroying primal communities and their practices of love, equality, and care. We can discover a deeply buried revolutionary core of these great wisdom traditions that was more evident when these traditions first emerged. This core has often been preserved in the practices and the imaginations of what have been seen as dissident, heretical, and esoteric teachings, and of marginalized communities within the traditions, which have preserved what is most liberatory and solidaristic within those traditions.
We might look briefly at one striking example, the[7] In the famous so-called “last words of the Buddha” we find the term Appamāda, in Pali, or Apramāda in Sanskrit. This term is in the form of a negation and is often translated as both “non-negligence” and “non-delusion.” To be non-negligent means to give proper care. To be non-deluded is to have an awakened mind, to practice mindfulness. So, this “final message” of the Buddha, the core of the Wisdom of the Middle Way, is to work out one’s salvation (as part of that of the salvation of the community) through mindful and awakened care.
This means, in effect, that we should not lose touch with the basis of the Humanization Revolution, the revolution that first established communities of mutual awareness and mutual care. One can thus see that the values of that Revolution and of the Deep Commons that it established are at the heart of Buddhist wisdom. A similar analysis works, I believe, for other major spiritual traditions developed over the history of our community.
Finally, we might examine briefly an example of what we can learn from our living revolutionary traditions. Over 20 years ago I attended a World Peace Conference in Kolkata, and, by very remarkable good fortune, was assigned a roommate by the name of E.P. Menon. I soon discovered that Menon was one of the great activists and practitioners of the Gandhian tradition. I learned of his many extraordinary experiences in the Sarvodaya Movement (literally, the movement for the welfare of all). These included walking across India for three years with Gandhi’s successor, Vinoba Bhave, soliciting pledges of bhoodan, the gift of land, to put into cooperative production. I eventually learned more about the history of the Sarvodaya Movement and its comprehensive program of social transformation.
Among the strategies included in this program are swaraj or direct local self-rule, swadeshi or production based in the community’s traditional lands, the shanti sena, or army of communal mediators and peacemakers, the ashram, an intentional community of practice to be established in every neighborhood and village (in effect, a model ecovillage that will show how sarvodaya can be realized in the life of the small community), bhoodan, as mentioned, the gift of land for common cultivation, gramdan, the gift of the village (or any local community), when it becomes largely communalized, the gram sevak or community worker and organizer to be sent to every village and neighborhood, communal oversight by the gram panchayat, a revolutionized version of the traditional local council, and direct democratic decision-making by the gram sabha, or local community assembly. Though the council and assembly forms are not unique to Sarvodaya, their distinctive quality is that they are in the future to have ultimate authority in a society consisting of autonomous Village Republics.[8]
I have never come across any more comprehensive real-world program that has inspired many millions of people. Over the years, the movement recruited tens of thousands of sarvodaya workers, put millions of acres into cooperative production, established many intentional communities, and inspired extraordinary educational projects such as the Barefoot College.[9] Despite enormous achievements the truly far-reaching goals were not yet achieved, and the effort faltered in the face of powerful global and national capitalist and statist forces. Yet, this makes such a vision and the practice that accompanies it no less urgent for humanity and the Earth. One must hope that Sarvodaya will be an important topic of study in our future communal schools, communal lyceums, communal colleges, and communal universities.
In summary, we have much to work with in our striving toward a Rehumanization and Recommunization Revolution. We can look to the Primordial Revolutionary Story, to living indigenous traditions of solidarity and care, to the liberatory dimensions of the great wisdom traditions, and to modern and contemporary liberatory movements that have realised to significant, if varying, degrees, the elements of thought and practice that are the preconditions for that Revolution.
Undertaking such a revolution may seem overwhelming and even unimaginable in any practical, real-world sense. Such a prospect will quite naturally overwhelm anyone who attempts to take on such a challenge individually, or with only loose connections to even the best of potential comrades and coworkers. It will be almost unimaginable unless one has a sense that in some significant way the needed Revolution is already beginning to happen, here and now, and that we are part of it.
Fortunately, it is quite possible to have such a sense. There is experiential evidence that engagement in such a project will be deeply fulfilling and edifying, if it is undertaken collectively and communally as the good and necessary work of growing communities of liberation and solidarity, awakening and care. This is possible if we begin, here and now, to live the most important part of our lives within growing communities with an ethos of revolutionary-evolutionary love, in touch with the Deep Commons.
But how do we start, if we find no such existing community in what seems to be the “here and now” of our lives? A century and a half ago, Elisée Reclus the great anarchist philosopher-geographer, had some very good advice on this subject that remains just as salutary today. According to Reclus, we should “gather around ourselves friends who live and act in the same way. It is step by step, through small, loving, and intelligent associations that the great communal society will be formed.”[10]
So, we can begin there, with the affinity group, in its deepest and most meaningful sense, as a small community of wisdom and love. We can begin regenerating the Deep Commons there, with a few of our closest family, friends and comrades who share our aspirations. We can begin practicing revolutionary-evolutionary love there. We can create the community there and have confidence that it will lead us to effective ways of collectively creating that community of communities that will finally succeed in regenerating the Deep Commons everywhere.
This is the ultimate answer to the question posed at the beginning of these reflections. How are we going to tell the story that will change the world? We tell the story by living it.
Bibliography
Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Cafard, Max. “Zen Anarchy” at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-cafard-zen- anarchy
Clark, John. "Buddhism, Radical Critique and Revolutionary Praxis" at https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Buddhism-Radical-Critique-and-Revolutionary-Praxis-John-Clark.pdf
Gandhi, M.K. Village Swaraj. Amadabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1962.
Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021.
Hawkes, Kristen. “The Centrality of Ancestral Grandmothering in Human Evolution” in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 60, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 765–781, at https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa029
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Radical Anthropology Group website at http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/
Reclus, Elisée. Quoted in John Clark and Camille Martin, editors and translators, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), p. 70.
Roy, Bunker. “Learning from a barefoot movement” at https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy_learning_from_a_barefoot_movement
Tomasello, Michael et al. “Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: the cooperative eye hypothesis” in Journal of Human Evolution 52 (2007): 314-320.
Whiten, Andrew and David Erdal. “The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins” in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2012 367, 2119-2129.
Vittikal, Thomas. Gandhian Sarvodaya: Realizing a Realistic Utopia (New Delhi: National Gandhian Museum and Gyan Publishing House, 2002.
Notes
[1] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021).
[2] See Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Boehm conceives of such a strategy as a more generalized response to social hierarchies, rather than focusing on women’s use of it in the achievement of humanization.
[3] See Kristen Hawkes, “The Centrality of Ancestral Grandmothering in Human Evolution” in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 60, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 765–781, https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa029
[4] On Deep Social Mind, see Andrew Whiten and David Erdal, “The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins” in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2012 367, 2119-2129. On “cooperative eyes,” see Michael Tomasello et al, “Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: the cooperative eye hypothesis” in Journal of Human Evolution 52 (2007): 314-320.
[5] See Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
[6] See the website of the Radical Anthropology Group at http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/, especially the recommended reading section.
[7] On the anarchic implications of Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular, see John Clark, "Buddhism, Radical Critique and Revolutionary Praxis" at https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Buddhism-Radical-Critique-and-Revolutionary-Praxis-John-Clark.pdf, and Max Cafard, “Zen Anarchy” at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-cafard-zen-anarchy
[8] For the classic formulation of the goals of Sarvodaya, see M. K. Gandhi, Village Swaraj (Amadabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1962); and for a more recent and comprehensive assessment, see Thomas Vittikal, Gandhian Sarvodaya: Realizing a Realistic Utopia (New Delhi: National Gandhian Museum and Gyan Publishing House, 2002).
[9] See Bunker Roy, “Learning from a barefoot movement” at https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy_learning_from_a_barefoot_movement
[10] Elisée Reclus, quoted in John Clark and Camille Martin, editors and translators, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), p. 70.
Many good ideas were discussed at the Deep Commons conference. These ideas are not only good; they are also revolutionary. Taken together, they add up to the recipe for a revolution of a certain type, one that we might call, for good anthropological reasons, a “Rehumanization Revolution,” and, for good political reasons, a “Recommunization Revolution.”
Among these revolutionary empathy; collective healing; consensual decision-making; moving from human affinities to inter-species ones; the Necrocene, the new era of death on Earth; disaster anarchism and disaster utopia as responses to social and ecological crisis; somatic healing as a component of political strategy; indigenous traditions of cooperation and care; small-scale social institutions such as communes, superblocks, alternative families, ecovillages, cooperatives; the gift economy; humans as homo donans – the gift-giving and receiving being; the free-giving economy; the abolition of money; the importance of plasticity; beyond resilience, and even regeneration, to revolution; thinking about the seventh generation; revolutionary love, solidarity and care; and, finally, perhaps as important as any of these: the need for Storytelling.
This crucial final idea poses a pressing existential question to us. How are we going to weave together all these ideas into the story that will change the world? How are we going to tell this story?
One way of telling it is, in part, to begin with “the Dawn of Everything,” as is done in a recent, already rather classic work. Explaining “the Dawn of Everything,” might seem a This includes the dawn of things like inequality, hierarchy. and domination, on the one hand, and of things like liberty, equality, and community, on the other. It’s a bit ironic that the authors of The Dawn of Everything caution us against looking for the dawn of certain things, and most notably, inequality.[1]
Yet, the question of “the origin of inequality” is a meaningful one that leads to the even more crucial question of “the origin of equality.” Granted, there is no arkhé of origin, no privileged moment of the beginning of inequality, or of anything else, for that matter. Yet, there are processes of origination of both arkhé and anarkhé, of domination and the foreclosure of free flourishing on the one hand, and of non-domination and the liberation of free flourishing on the other.
The dawning of the latter of these was simultaneous with the dawning of a kind of communal consciousness that is inseparable from the dawning of human language and a humanized and communalized form of communication. Communication, communization, and communing converged in the emergence a Deep Commons, a deep commonality. This is our primordial history, the first chapter of the Human Story. It is a history that is still very much alive, though threatened as never before.
We might conceptualize this Human Story, as an integral part of the Earth Story, in terms of five geohistorical revolutions (or geo-revolutionary epochs) within our human period of geohistory.
The first such geohistorical revolution was the Humanization or Communization Revolution. This Revolution gave birth to symbolic forms such as art, religion, and language, and above all to the egalitarian caring community that nurtured humans and humanization, and was seen as part of a larger, more-than-human, Earth Community, recognized explicitly in concepts of a wider, more-than-human system of kinship. This revolution gave birth to the anarkhic community.
The second revolution, the Agricultural, Patriarchal and Statist Revolution, instituted the society of arkhé, the society of domination and hierarchy, and increasingly established patriarchal domination in every sphere of existence.
The third revolution, the Industrial and Capitalist Revolution, continued the development and expansion of arkhé in every social and spatial direction, and the superimposition of a human-dominated technosphere on the biosphere.
In the fourth revolution, the Cybernetic and Megatechnical Revolution, technological domination becomes increasingly automatized, internalized, and immunized from any critically conscious, reflective, value-based steering by human agents. This is a revolution of domination that makes liberatory revolution almost unthinkable, an absurd and indeed foolish fantasy, as the material conditions for it become more easily assessable.
Revolutions two through four have progressively expanded the realm of domination within human society, over other species, and over the Earth. They have produced the sixth great mass extinction of life on Earth, and the rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, in addition to many other hyper-entropic and ecocidal effects. At the same time they establish nihilism as a hegemonic ideology in the form of a resolute disavowal of the future and the reality of the Earth.
The Fifth Geohistorical Revolution, if it occurs, will be a Rehumanization and Recommunization Revolution. It will consist in the restoration of a non-dominating, egalitarian
One must ponder the fact that in all previous geohistorical revolutions humans did not consciously choose to change the direction of geohistory. Either we did not realize that The next revolution will be the first one in which humanity has been consciously aware of its revolutionary project. It will also be the first revolution based on our acceptance of our being as deeply geo-historical beings.
It is It pointed to the fact that the revolution must be carried out on the level of the person, on the level of groups at many scales of organization (primary and intimate, local, regional and transregional), and on the level of the whole of humanity and the Earth. We might say, it followed the imperative, “Think and act globally, regionally, locally, and personally.”
Such a project will require the ubiquitous and pervasive development of the ability to think critically and dialectically, to feel humanely and communally, and to act collectively and federatively, at all these levels. It will require deep reflection on the nature of preconditions, and on what needs to be done in all spheres of social determination, at the micro, meso, and macro levels. It will require a movement from the goal of prefiguration to one of transfiguration. It will require the creation, step by step, of a rehumanized and recommunized social institutional structure, social imaginary, social ideology, social ethos, and social materiality.
But we are already far ahead of the story. We can refer to “rehumanizing” and “recommunizing” only because there was a Humanization Revolution that was at the same time a Communalization Revolution. Significantly, this first successful revolution was also an anarkhic revolution, because, for it to achieve all its positive goals, the “logic of dominance,” or arkhé, in existing primate society had to be overthrown. This revolution was the first world-historical confrontation between arkhé, or domination, and anarkhé, or free cooperation and mutual flourishing. In it, anarkhé prevailed.
Previous primate societies had been societies of hierarchy and dominance. The alpha males (that is, the arkhic males) were creatures that aimed at monopolizing females while at the same time minimizing their own efforts. The dominant alpha or arkhic male was the major threat to the emergence of the humanized, cooperative community. Consequently, as part of the humanization and communization process, females developed strategies to defeat alpha or arkhic male dominance and to promote cooperative behavior that would protect and nurture the community, and especially its most needy members, its offspring. Such strategies have been conceptualized as forms of “reverse dominance hierarchy.”[2]
Females developed ritual strategies to secure mates who would stay with the mothers and support the offspring’s needs. It has been found that highly symbolic red ochre was used in the earliest such rituals of women’s solidarity and power in many cultures across the world, and versions of such Female Cosmetic Coalitions have continued up to recent times. In these rituals, groups of women concealed the timing of their fertility and ovulation, intimidated the alpha males, and defeated the efforts of these arkhic males to control sex and reproduction. The females thus successfully asserted their collective revolutionary power.
These anarkhic females had an incentive to attract anarkhic, communitarian males who would remain with the family and community and would cooperate in supplying food and care for offspring. Further, non-alpha, anarkhic males had an incentive to cooperate with anarkhic females against alpha male dominance, of which they were also victims. The result was the defeat of that dominance, and the establishment of communal childcare in which human infants were exposed to a variety of human caretakers, including, most notably, grandmothers, who became a key factor in caring for the generations, and thus, in human evolution.[3]
This collective care fostered the ability to recognize and respond to the nuances of facial expression and resulted more sensitive and humane communication. Humans developed what has been called Deep Social Mind, the capacity for reflexive “mind-reading,” that is for mutually interpreting mental states through intersubjective interactions. This depended on another crucial development, the evolution of human “cooperative eyes” that produced greatly expanded capacity for shared attention.[4]
On an evolutionary level, the advances in attention interaction between humanization and communalization and the emergence of complex qualities that further promoted humanization and communalization. In all these aspects, collective childcare or alloparenting (shared, cooperative parenting responsibilities) was central the humanization process. It became part of the basis for a larger caring community in which solidarity and love are generalized in communal practices.[5]
So, this is the primordial revolutionary story, in which anarkhic female coalitions and female alliances with non-arkhic males succeeded in establishing the egalitarian, cooperative community that was the primordial wellspring of the Deep Commons.
For the fascinating details of this story, one can look to the work of the Radical Anthropology Group and to anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Camilla Power, Chris Knight, Sarah Hrdy, Andrew Whiten, and Christopher Boehm.[6]
If this story, in the context of the subsequent history of geohistorical revolutions, makes sense to us, and is well-grounded, we will necessarily see our current role in geohistory as, above all, to move as rapidly as possible into the period of the fifth geohistorical revolution. What, then do we have at our disposal, if we seek to do this?
The first thing we possess is most obviously the indigenous egalitarian, solidaristic, and communal traditions and practices that have survived under the civilization of The strongest evidence for the possibility of something is its actual existence. Many of us have accordingly come to recognize the transformative and liberatory power of the living and thriving indigenous communities that have carried on the egalitarian and communal traditions of that first Revolution. If we knew nothing more than the story of the power of indigenous culture to convert a group of brilliant but ideologically misguided young vanguardist militants into what came to be known as the Zapatista Movement, with all extraordinary social achievements, this would be enough to convince us of this miraculous power.
Perhaps less often recognized is the degree to which the tradition of anarkhé is preserved in the great wisdom traditions of the Axial Age, which were a reaction against the forces of domination that were destroying primal communities and their practices of love, equality, and care. We can discover a deeply buried revolutionary core of these great wisdom traditions that was more evident when these traditions first emerged. This core has often been preserved in the practices and the imaginations of what have been seen as dissident, heretical, and esoteric teachings, and of marginalized communities within the traditions, which have preserved what is most liberatory and solidaristic within those traditions.
We might look briefly at one striking example, the[7] In the famous so-called “last words of the Buddha” we find the term Appamāda, in Pali, or Apramāda in Sanskrit. This term is in the form of a negation and is often translated as both “non-negligence” and “non-delusion.” To be non-negligent means to give proper care. To be non-deluded is to have an awakened mind, to practice mindfulness. So, this “final message” of the Buddha, the core of the Wisdom of the Middle Way, is to work out one’s salvation (as part of that of the salvation of the community) through mindful and awakened care.
This means, in effect, that we should not lose touch with the basis of the Humanization Revolution, the revolution that first established communities of mutual awareness and mutual care. One can thus see that the values of that Revolution and of the Deep Commons that it established are at the heart of Buddhist wisdom. A similar analysis works, I believe, for other major spiritual traditions developed over the history of our community.
Finally, we might examine briefly an example of what we can learn from our living revolutionary traditions. Over 20 years ago I attended a World Peace Conference in Kolkata, and, by very remarkable good fortune, was assigned a roommate by the name of E.P. Menon. I soon discovered that Menon was one of the great activists and practitioners of the Gandhian tradition. I learned of his many extraordinary experiences in the Sarvodaya Movement (literally, the movement for the welfare of all). These included walking across India for three years with Gandhi’s successor, Vinoba Bhave, soliciting pledges of bhoodan, the gift of land, to put into cooperative production. I eventually learned more about the history of the Sarvodaya Movement and its comprehensive program of social transformation.
Among the strategies included in this program are swaraj or direct local self-rule, swadeshi or production based in the community’s traditional lands, the shanti sena, or army of communal mediators and peacemakers, the ashram, an intentional community of practice to be established in every neighborhood and village (in effect, a model ecovillage that will show how sarvodaya can be realized in the life of the small community), bhoodan, as mentioned, the gift of land for common cultivation, gramdan, the gift of the village (or any local community), when it becomes largely communalized, the gram sevak or community worker and organizer to be sent to every village and neighborhood, communal oversight by the gram panchayat, a revolutionized version of the traditional local council, and direct democratic decision-making by the gram sabha, or local community assembly. Though the council and assembly forms are not unique to Sarvodaya, their distinctive quality is that they are in the future to have ultimate authority in a society consisting of autonomous Village Republics.[8]
I have never come across any more comprehensive real-world program that has inspired many millions of people. Over the years, the movement recruited tens of thousands of sarvodaya workers, put millions of acres into cooperative production, established many intentional communities, and inspired extraordinary educational projects such as the Barefoot College.[9] Despite enormous achievements the truly far-reaching goals were not yet achieved, and the effort faltered in the face of powerful global and national capitalist and statist forces. Yet, this makes such a vision and the practice that accompanies it no less urgent for humanity and the Earth. One must hope that Sarvodaya will be an important topic of study in our future communal schools, communal lyceums, communal colleges, and communal universities.
In summary, we have much to work with in our striving toward a Rehumanization and Recommunization Revolution. We can look to the Primordial Revolutionary Story, to living indigenous traditions of solidarity and care, to the liberatory dimensions of the great wisdom traditions, and to modern and contemporary liberatory movements that have realised to significant, if varying, degrees, the elements of thought and practice that are the preconditions for that Revolution.
Undertaking such a revolution may seem overwhelming and even unimaginable in any practical, real-world sense. Such a prospect will quite naturally overwhelm anyone who attempts to take on such a challenge individually, or with only loose connections to even the best of potential comrades and coworkers. It will be almost unimaginable unless one has a sense that in some significant way the needed Revolution is already beginning to happen, here and now, and that we are part of it.
Fortunately, it is quite possible to have such a sense. There is experiential evidence that engagement in such a project will be deeply fulfilling and edifying, if it is undertaken collectively and communally as the good and necessary work of growing communities of liberation and solidarity, awakening and care. This is possible if we begin, here and now, to live the most important part of our lives within growing communities with an ethos of revolutionary-evolutionary love, in touch with the Deep Commons.
But how do we start, if we find no such existing community in what seems to be the “here and now” of our lives? A century and a half ago, Elisée Reclus the great anarchist philosopher-geographer, had some very good advice on this subject that remains just as salutary today. According to Reclus, we should “gather around ourselves friends who live and act in the same way. It is step by step, through small, loving, and intelligent associations that the great communal society will be formed.”[10]
So, we can begin there, with the affinity group, in its deepest and most meaningful sense, as a small community of wisdom and love. We can begin regenerating the Deep Commons there, with a few of our closest family, friends and comrades who share our aspirations. We can begin practicing revolutionary-evolutionary love there. We can create the community there and have confidence that it will lead us to effective ways of collectively creating that community of communities that will finally succeed in regenerating the Deep Commons everywhere.
This is the ultimate answer to the question posed at the beginning of these reflections. How are we going to tell the story that will change the world? We tell the story by living it.
Bibliography
Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Cafard, Max. “Zen Anarchy” at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-cafard-zen- anarchy
Clark, John. "Buddhism, Radical Critique and Revolutionary Praxis" at https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Buddhism-Radical-Critique-and-Revolutionary-Praxis-John-Clark.pdf
Gandhi, M.K. Village Swaraj. Amadabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1962.
Graeber, David and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021.
Hawkes, Kristen. “The Centrality of Ancestral Grandmothering in Human Evolution” in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 60, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 765–781, at https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa029
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Radical Anthropology Group website at http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/
Reclus, Elisée. Quoted in John Clark and Camille Martin, editors and translators, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), p. 70.
Roy, Bunker. “Learning from a barefoot movement” at https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy_learning_from_a_barefoot_movement
Tomasello, Michael et al. “Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: the cooperative eye hypothesis” in Journal of Human Evolution 52 (2007): 314-320.
Whiten, Andrew and David Erdal. “The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins” in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2012 367, 2119-2129.
Vittikal, Thomas. Gandhian Sarvodaya: Realizing a Realistic Utopia (New Delhi: National Gandhian Museum and Gyan Publishing House, 2002.
Notes
[1] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021).
[2] See Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Boehm conceives of such a strategy as a more generalized response to social hierarchies, rather than focusing on women’s use of it in the achievement of humanization.
[3] See Kristen Hawkes, “The Centrality of Ancestral Grandmothering in Human Evolution” in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 60, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 765–781, https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa029
[4] On Deep Social Mind, see Andrew Whiten and David Erdal, “The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins” in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2012 367, 2119-2129. On “cooperative eyes,” see Michael Tomasello et al, “Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: the cooperative eye hypothesis” in Journal of Human Evolution 52 (2007): 314-320.
[5] See Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
[6] See the website of the Radical Anthropology Group at http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/, especially the recommended reading section.
[7] On the anarchic implications of Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular, see John Clark, "Buddhism, Radical Critique and Revolutionary Praxis" at https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Buddhism-Radical-Critique-and-Revolutionary-Praxis-John-Clark.pdf, and Max Cafard, “Zen Anarchy” at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-cafard-zen-anarchy
[8] For the classic formulation of the goals of Sarvodaya, see M. K. Gandhi, Village Swaraj (Amadabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1962); and for a more recent and comprehensive assessment, see Thomas Vittikal, Gandhian Sarvodaya: Realizing a Realistic Utopia (New Delhi: National Gandhian Museum and Gyan Publishing House, 2002).
[9] See Bunker Roy, “Learning from a barefoot movement” at https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy_learning_from_a_barefoot_movement
[10] Elisée Reclus, quoted in John Clark and Camille Martin, editors and translators, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), p. 70.
Matt York
May 26, 2024, 7:40:11 AMMay 26
to Ariel Salleh, Wsm Discuss, Radcal Democracy
Hi there,
For anyone who wants to watch John's closing remarks in full, or many of the other contributions he mentions, there's a conference archive here:
26 May 2024, 09:41 by ariels...@gmail.com:
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