Dead but not forgotten
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David Graeber’s, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow.
Review here
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/dawn-of-everything/
Among the propositions of Graeber and Wengrow are these:
We barely have the language to express what our remote ancestors were up to 95% of the time.
The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. The real story is much more complex – and interesting.
Ancient peoples lived with a rich variety of social and political structures, even varying according to the season. (Very flexible, those folks).
Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.
Inequality in large-scale human communities isn’t inevitable, nor is it a product of farming. Ditto, patriarchy.
Past societies that valued women were happier places to live. (Duh).
We can do better. We have done better.alanjjohnstone quoted:
“Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.”
Spot on, alan. Marx’s viewpoint. Humanity as an actively conscious subject, changing its ‘material conditions’, not merely passively reflecting them.
Other reviews (via Libcom)
https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/ by Chris Knight
All Things Being Equal
by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale
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