Hud955
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I don't have a crystal ball, Vin, but it would not at all surprise me if some form of religion existed within socialism. I don't for one moment regard human beings as being driven by rationalism. In a propertyless society, though, I don't see how it could be a hierarchical or dogmatic form of belief with a centralised authority. I imagine it might be more like earlier forms of religious belief that varied from place to place and from person to person and changed frequently according to social needs.As for ideology, it depends what you mean by that. Because there could be no structural or fixed conflicts of interest in a classless society, it does not mean there will be no conflicts of interest. Though there would be no room for class ideology, I'm not sure there would be no ideology. We live permanently metaphorical lives, and we need a vehicle through which to express our social existence. Even science is unable to escape the need for analogy.
I don't think the SPGB has any trouble at all in explaining this upsurge in religious zealotry pgb. Nor can a movement like ISIS which is behaving in direct contradiction to the dogmas of all known versions of Islam be explained in terms of religion. The antagonism that ISIS has generated from almost all sections of the Muslim world does not provide any evidence that it has emerged as a popular movement, even though it is now attracting some individual support. Warfare is an expensive business and has to be funded. It is much more easily explained by following the money. Disentangling the complexities of the situation at present is not easy and there is not enough information to form a really coherent analysis yet, but some, at least, of its support seems to be coming from the Saudis who have had their eyes on the lands to the north of them for some time. Just to be clear, the SPGB position is that military conflict cannot be understood without reference to the material interests of capitalism. It does not claim that all military action can be explained as an immidiate and direct response to commercial interests. The interactions between ideology and material need are often complex, and each case has to be analysed in its own terms. The base and superstructure idea is a tool of analysis founded in an understanding of the material necessities of human existence. It is not the kind of crude analysis you suppose.
Hi YMS.We go in ignorance into the future, whether that future is a capitalist or socialist one, and though scientific knowledge can provide us with pointers to assess the possibilities or likelihoods we face, nothing can be known for sure, certainly nothing in detail. Having identified what does not meet our interests within capitalism, the first thing we have to do is get rid of it. Once we have done that, then we can concern ourselves with building a new society and consider what forms we want it to take. In the meantime, though, we have to get there. And that means – at least in part – winning the battle of ideology. So while I agree with your general approach to this issue at a theoretical level, it provides no answer to our ideological opponents who claim that warfare and social conflict are innate in human beings and that capitalism is therefore a perfect expression of our human nature. If that is so, then why go to the trouble and effort to get rid of it? The answer you seem to be giving is to obtain economic freedom. But if, as these writers argue, socialism and the end of economic necessity will not free us from some of the worst kind of destructive social behaviour, then why bother. It weakens our case, and we need an answer to it. Hunter gatherer studies provide us with one approach to countering these arguments, and I think we should pursue them. Unfortunately, I don't have £60 to spend on a hardback so I'm unlikely to read the book you refer to. If the authors' main conclusion is that mobile (band or 'immediate'return') hunter gatherers are least violent, that sedentary, delayed return groups (horticulturalists, pastoralists, drovers) are more violent, and that complex hunter gatherers (who control unusually abundant resources) are most violent, then they don't seem to be saying anything that isn't already very well known. From what I can discover, though, from reviews, postive and negative, the two authors have concentrated their research on groups that are well known as outliers in their social behaviour. (Their data selection process seems to mirror that of Pinker – it's a well worn trail.) Not having read the book, though, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about this. I'll also do some asking around among the hunter-gatherer ethnographers I come into contact with. On a very general point, American antrhopology in both its theory and practice is very closely attuned to the home nation's imperial project – just as British anthropology used to be, so there is always a prima facie cause for scepticism.
Apologies to everyone who has been engaged on this thread if I am repeating anything that has already been dealt with. I'm new onto it and I haven't yet read everything that has been discussed. YMS"I've lost the reference, a book recently came across my desk looking at early warfare. The conclusion (all I had time to look at) was that if you defien war as "socially sanctioned violence against another polity" (I think that was teh formula) then war has always been with us, including among hunter gatherers, however, if you don't take on that definition, and become stricter in your definition of war, then it hasn't been."The principal purveyor of this view is Richard Wrangham who has sought to show by a statistical analysis of hunter gatherer data (considerably more detailed and less cherry picked than Pinker's) that warfare is common in pre-state societies. Douglas P Fry, his principal opponent, objected on the grounds that Wrangham was including raiding, feuding and individual one-on-one violence in his definition of warfare, and set about demonstrating this from the data provided. Wrangham retorted that Fry was simply defining warfare out of existence. Fry, took up his challenge by dispensing with cultural definitions altogether and analysing the data on homicides mathematically: one-on-one homicide, one-on-more than one homicide, two-on-two etc. He also analysed the data in terms of different forms of hunter gatherer organisation (delayed-return, immediate-return, complex). His conclusions have driven a coach and horses through Wrangham's argument, showing that group violence could not be significantly demonstrated, especially among immediate return hunter gatherers. At the same time his analysis revealed few individual homicides for most groups, but peaking in a few others which were long known to be outliers in this regard. I am summarising rather crudely here because his tables are elaborate and extensive.It's a shame that you cannot find the reference to the original claims YMS because there have been a number of arguments of this kind put forward recently. What you do say, though, implies that whoever it was does not know much about hunter gatherer organisation, and in particular the organisation of immediate return hunger gatherers. These people have no forms of status or authority within their bands, and therefore nothing that even approaches the nature of a 'polity'. It is even arguable that, lacking fixed social relationships, they do not even constitute a 'society' as we would ordinarily understand it. It would therefore seem meaninless to apply definitions to groups which include notions such as 'polity' or 'social sanction'. Being extreme individualists, hunger gatherers are not collectively in a position to sanction anything, or otherwise. A lack of interference in the actions of others does not equate to a sanction. On the issue of human nature, it seems to me that the most we can say is that human beings are capable of homicide, warfare etc, but not that they have a natural disposition to it. That can be made on the argument that we have microbiological proof now that environment affects behaviour, but also on the obvious ground that warfare and indeed homicide is known to exist in some cultures but not others. For me the value of the information provided by ethnographers since hunter gatherers were first recognised as a separate form of social organisation sixty years ago, is that it blows out of the water all notions of 'innate' tendencies to make war within the human species. Beyond the issue of violence, the extreme egalitarian nature of hunter gatherer bands is a powerful argument against the universality of property and exchange relations in human societies, while these taken together with the condition of 'abundance' in which they are almost universally found, also undermine all of the fundamental preconceptions of neoclassical economics. Band hunter gatherers really do live in a condition of primitive communism, and their ancient matrilineal structures vindicate Engels view on this matter after a century of his being dismissed by all and sundry.
Hi all. Just arrived back on earth from a few weeks on planet ancap. Glad to be home. (Smeetish whimsy preferable to praxeological gobbledegook anyday.)I'm perplexed, though. Why is theory idealist? Is that what is being claimed? In my neck of the woods theory can be either idealist or materialist depending on whether it makes idealist or materialist assumptions. Materialism is itself a theory (as well as a pragmatic assumption.) Isn't it?
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.
Be careful about this one DJP. The Man the Hunter conference was seminal in changing the attitudes of anthropologists, and to some extent the public, towards hunter gatherers. Sahlins's labour calculations showed that the average hunter gatherer band, rather than living a life that was 'nasty, brutish and short' in fact lived in a state of 'original affluence.' Members of these bands spend approximately only four hours a day providing for their needs and spend the rest of their time eating, drinking, socialising engaging in collective activities and playing with the kids. That is, according to Sahlins.The excitement generated by this claim led to a lot more focused research, which showed (as these things often do) that it wasn't quite accurate. For a start, Sahlins used a relatively small sample of hunter gatherer groups to achieve his results and he focused entirely on their hunting and gathering activities. He didn't include, for example, the time taken to make weapons or clothes, prepare food, make or strike camp, and so on. Subsequent research (depending on the source) estimates that band hunter gatherers spend on average, 7-9 hours a day working. And this is an average. In reality, much depends on the environment in which hunter gatherers live and on the seasonality of their food supply. Some are well fed, others often go hungry at certain times of the year. Sahlins has himself also admitted that, to change people's attitudes, he chose to express his theory in highly polemical terms and used the phrase 'original affluence' for its dramatic effect.Nevertheles, there remains a kernal of truth in what he says, and his claim appears to be literally true for some (a few) hunter gatherer bands. The most important thing to remember here, I think, is that the social and ecological circumstances of modern hunter gatherers differ widely from one another. The reality of their social existence is always nuanced and you need to be careful about making universalising or unhedged claims. It is hard to research anthropological evidence since the popular books are extremely untrustworthy and the academic literature is often dense and confusing. Worse, social anthropologists have never been known for the precision of their research and are often swept along by the latest fashionable academic -ism (currently 'postmodernism') . Much anthroplogical evidence and its interpretation is also highly contested even among anthropologists themselves. But there are a number of synoptic accounts that I found helpful, particularly the early chapters of Kelly's The Foraging Spectrum which deals with Sahlins's claim in the course of giving a brief history of the subject.Richard B Lee is also an interesting anthropologist and author. He's a (vulgar) Marxist. His arguments are crude from a socialist perspective, but at least he's on something of the same wavelength. He has championed the historical reality of 'primitive communism' in the anthropological world.
Here's the Independent's take on the research. It's a rather more muddled account than that of the New Scientist, but it gets the same message across. The paper gives Jared Diamond the right to reply, and typically, he gives a fudged response, quoting the warlike nature of the Dani people of Papua New Guinea. Many tribal groupings in New Guinea like the Dani and the Tufi are or were warlike (colonisers often managed to suppress inter-tribal conflicts). But the Dani are 'tribal' people, and despite the Independent article, tribal people were not the subject of this research. Nor are tribal peoples thought to be representative of our ancestral societies. Like most 'tribal' societies, and unlike the band hunter gatherers, the Dani have develped social stratification, an elementary form of property and in this case 'barter' arrangements. Also unlike band hunter gatherers, but like many tribal peoples, the Dani are definitely warlike.Conflicts of the kind that fall under the author's definition of 'war' do exist in band hunter gatherer societies, but they are rare and they are often found (suggestively) among band hunter gatherer peoples who live in close proximity to warring tribal societies or chiefdoms (or have had a long history of colonial contact with slave traders). Band hunter gatherers have no permanent social stratifcation and no systems of social authority, so one reason among many why warlike or raiding activity does not much occur among them is that it is extremely difficult to organise a war party by consensus. And on the rare occasion that they do set out to meet their 'enemy' the whole enterprise tends to fall apart rapidly with many of the participants returning home before conflict begins. Among several groups studied, 'sore feet' and 'tummy ache' were reportedly the main reasons given for dropping out of these activities. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-it-natural-for-humans-to-make-war-new-study-of-tribal-societies-reveals-conflict-is-an-alien-concept-8718069.html?origin=internalSearch
Interesting new study featured in the Scientific American, though the findings are hardly new, as is claimed. They corroborate findings about band hunter gatherers that have been well-established for decades.Unfortunately, extrapolating the findings directly to our pre-property ancestral societies isn't as straightforward as the article suggests. We have no way of knowing if modern band hunter gatherers reflect the social realities of so-called 'nomadic' hunter gatherers in the palaeolithic past. Currently though, information from modern band hunter gatherer societies (foragers as they are now often known) is being used to establish hypotheses which can then be tested out against the archaeological record. Some of the conclusions that the journo and the authors draw, or to be fair, hint at, are based on a very crude theoretical model than any historical materialist could easily challenge. (They sound highly ideological in any case. Social anthropology has never been known for its methodological or theoretical rigour.)It's good to have further empirical evidence though. it's also good to see a challenge to people like Pinker in the popular scientific press. (Pinker has already been forced to admit that he had included horticulturalists in his calculations in 'The Better Angels of our Nature.)http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/07/18/new-study-of-foragers-undermines-claim-that-war-has-deep-evolutionary-roots/
Then you've got quite a job on your hands, Steve, to justify your view. Your mate's opinion is not sufficient. After going over this in some detail (see previous discussion) with twc it's very clear to me, at least, that given the way he is using the word determinism, there is absolutely no contradiction between saying that socialism is 'determined' and saying 'the emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself.' By determinism he means 'a determined process', one subject to cause and effect. This does not imply that socialism will automatically happen or that we don't consciously have to bring it about. That is a fatalist position, not a deterministic one, in this sense. Over to you…
LOL. I think you and your mate were using the word determinism in the way that people like Sam Harris use it and not in the way twc is using it, which, is different. That's the real danger here, the danger that using the word is very likely to be misunderstood.
:-)Once again, I've no quibble there.I think your comment: 'Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes.' is a an extremely neat and precise way of summing up the argument. Thanks for that. I shall nick it.Good to know that we agree on a fundamental point.
I agree with much of what you say (though it is a very roundabout way of making your point). As I said in my last post, we appear to have been mostly disagreeing over terminology. I think that is obvious once the connection is made. So, rather than go through a point by point analysis and bore everyone including ourselves I’ll just to clear up a few points. No, I do not assert that socialism is not determined in the sense that you are using the term. I argued that it isn’t secure or inevitable, meaning, nothing could get in the way of it happening. Nor, as a matter of fact did I imply that contingency destroys determinism. That's your reading.You say: "I consider class consciousness to be simply our recognition of the determinism inherent in the materialist conception of history. That recognition is indispensable for establishing socialism. It alone gives us confidence in our social commitment to common ownership and democratic control."I disagree. There are as many different reasons for working for socialism as there are socialists, all of which reasons can be described as ‘class consciousness.’ My personal commitment to common ownership and democratic control is strong, not because I think socialism is inevitable or even determined but because I believe the alternative is unthinkable. If the working class all had to understand your argument from necessity to acquire class consciousness, those tricky contingencies would rapidly mount up against us.
twc. I'll reply shortly to this when I have some more time, but I've just seen your response to Emily Chalmers on another thread."Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes."Which very succinctly states the case; I agree unreservedly. The difference that remains between us I believe, is that I conclude from this that socialism is not inevitable and you appear not to (unless we mean something different by 'inevitable'). I think we have got into a terminological misunderstanding because your remark only makes sense to me if 'determine' is being used here in its weak sense. In the strong sense 'determine' implies a grand Laplacean determinism or at least a local interpretation of that. I take this to be an ordinary distinction in the way the word is commonly used. In the strong sense, socialism could only be determined if there were no other determined processes, which we both agree is not the case. In both uses, a determined process is a causal process only in the sense that its inner events are causally linked. So there is no contradiction in saying that the class struggle is a causal process (in this sense) but the outcome, socialism, is not inevitable (a direct and inevitable effect of that restricted set of causes).With a bit of luck we might even agree – on the main point, anyway.
.Frankly, twc, I've sifted your last post for meaning and can find almost nothing in it but rhetoric and a bad case of testosterone poisoning. Personally, I hope to arrive at conclusions by using my head and not my gonads – most of the time, at least. I'm genuinely sorry that you find my comments demoralising, but I guess if your conception of socialism is so hormonally charged, then it will take a lot to keep it pumped up. Your post seems to revolve around a straightforward reassertion of your belief in the necessity of socialism. And the only possible response to that is to wish you well with it. If that's what keeps you going, then that's fine by me. Our daily experience of capitalism is reflected in and through our consciousness in many different ways. On the one point of substance that I can find in your post, your assumption that I do not accept the notion of social causality is incorrect. I do think we are caught up in a huge array of social necessities: just not the ones that you suppose.
