The long awaited Primitive Communism thread…

[Ed]

As the paragraph on wiki says it's difficult to compare because it depends what you classify as work. If you include housework and general chores on top of the standard 40 hour week we would still probably work much longer hours. Plus "work" being a much more social affair than it is today it could be argued that large parts of their "work" time could also be counted as time spent socializing. edit: I'm not saying work today is not social but that it is to a lesser degree. Just wanted to clarify.

[Hud955]

That's a really important general point about there being little distinction between 'work' and social activities in hunter gatherer societies, Ed.  There is a strong argument about alienation to be made here.   As a result of the research that followed Sahlin's challenge, we are now much more aware that hunter gatherers have a very rich and varied social and cultural life.  And though they do sometimes struggle to meet their needs, they almost universally regard their environment as benign and supportive.  I'd be careful about Wiki's claim, though.  It's fairly clear that some hunter gatherer bands do not have to work long hours to meet all their needs (even when you add in general 'chores'), but some do.  Much depends on their environment.  Claimed averages for the labour time needed to meet hunter gatherer needs vary widely in the literature.  It's still a contested area.  And when it comes down to it, statistical averages don't really mean much in this context.   I think the more general conclusion that hunter-gatherer wants are not infinite but are socially chosen is not only more defensible than claims about how many hours HGs work in comparison to us and what counts as work, but also far more important  from our point of view because it pulls a major plank out from under neoclassical economic theory.  And hunter gatherers are living proof that other claims made by neoclassical economic theory are hogwash, too. There is a good chapter by John Gowdy in Lee and Daly's 'Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers'  called 'Hunter-gatherers and the mythology of the market' which explores this.

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