#3
16th May 2015, 03:35
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I mean, what's new here though? Have numerous studies not already confirmed this? What is also particularly dangerous is the legitimization of present political questions through biology and "human nature". What's even more dangerous is how it steps into the territory of evolutionary psychology, almost implying that the present demand for sexual egalitarianism somehow has its basis in our genetic composition. A proper Marxist would recognize that, on the contrary, there is no dissonance between society and human nature - and that sexual egalitarianism existed not out of some kind of evolutionary pressure but as an irrevocable consequence of a specific relation to nature. It's rather simple - a society that lives in precarious existence, that is always on the move, and whose survival is contingent upon food supplies from both sexes will obviously be egalitarian sexually.
Furthermore, is this egalitarianism in the political sense, as we know it today? No. Gender roles still existed, and while they weren't perpetuated through violence, and while both genders may have "shared power", the mere reality of social ramifications being ascribed to biological sex is not a model for 21st century feminism perhaps even by the standards of capitalism following neoliberalism which saw a great rise of women in various sectors and professions (of course followed by a violent and rabid reaction). The point of what constitutes man is rather simple: Man has never been an animal. The species homo sapiens was already out of the animal kingdom when it possessed the capacity to leave its ecological space and surroundings through the dynamic mobility of the upright posture and the freeing of the hands for intricate transformative tasks. When the species homo sapiens was no longer bound by a specific ecological condition of survival, it was no longer an animal with specific and indefinite ramifications ascribed to its behavior that have political significance today. The truth is that it does not matter what hunter-gatherers actually lived like. There's no reason to think they had war, or sexual domination, but at the same time there's no reason to think that this should inspire an iota of hope into present Communist or egalitarian struggles. Even if they were completely brutal, even if there was horrible shit, we can recognize that this brutality has nothing to do with the brutality of present day society. When scum evolutionary psychologists talk about war being "innate", demand that they give us the exact genetic sequences in our DNA which are responsible for war, and if they can't (just like they can't with intelligence) then they can shut the fuck up and hopefully resign from ever speaking publically. That's how you deal with this. If anything the idea of primitive Communism being a model for the future should introduce a radical anxiety of a basic question: If this is all we have going for us, what's to impede the same conditions which led to class society in a Communist world? |
There are a LOT of hunter-gatherer tribes that are not even remotely egalitarian. Among many hunter-gatherer tribes in the Arctic, living in areas where agriculture is virtually impossible, many tribes still consider women to be slaves. Many, many hunter-gatherer tribes also engaged in raiding and warfare, often to obtain more women. |
Hunter-gatherer tribes often didn't engage in full-scale agriculture simply because their own subsistence strategies worked better within the ecology that they were living. |
We don't "create our own ecology". That's also ridiculous. Humans have managed to create a number of cultural/technological mechanisms that mediate our relationship with our ecologies, making us able to live within those environments more efficiently, but ultimately, we do not control our environment, our environment controls us and we simply try to gain what leverage we can through culture. |
Hunter-gatherers are widely varied, and don't all have the same cultures. This idealization of hunter-gatherers is a remnant of the old idea of the "noble savage," and it's obsolete. |
Finally, humans are absolutely animals... And we act like it too, despite all of our convoluted attempts at pretending we don't. All empirical evidence shows that humans are primarily motivated by food and sex, just like all the other animals. |
Marxism is obsolete. It's a narrow worldview incapable of explaining even the slightest variation in societies with similar material cultures. It doesn't even have a basis to compare that variation to, because none of the orthodox Marxists seem believe in psychology... |
I noticed that Rafiq wrote some rant blog titled "Against Ecology" or something of the sort 0.0. Personally I am against most forms of "Evolutionary Psychology" because much of it has been used in the field as a thinly veiled cover for scientific racism or fuel for the "PUA" community. Nevertheless it is a useful and necessary tool in many instances. As a biologist it would be impossible to describe animal mating behavior without it. For instance there is tons of evidence that highlights the evolutionary advantage of decorative ornaments in birds for example that convey virtually no evolutionary advantage to the individual but nevertheless allow it to mate at much higher rates than individuals without the trait. You cannot explain that without an ecological understanding of the organism. Saying "show me the genes" is as irrelevant as asking a geneticist to "show you the genes" of height, even if it is a self-evidently heritable component. |
Marriage is a human universal, not because it should be, but because statistically, it is present in some form or another in every single recorded culture. To ignore that because it doesn't suit your narrow-minded ideologies doesn't make it any less relevant, it just makes you irrelevant. |
Yeah. With the data that we have, it would be ridiculous to expect marriage to go away completely with the destruction of class society when it is present in some form or another in every recorded society. And given biological/hormonal mechanisms of pairbonding, mechanisms such as the production of oxytocin (a fairly well understood mechanism nowadays), it's highly unlikely that marriage will ever completely dissolve. Marx was probably wrong in that regard. |
Again, this is wrong. Plenty of non-industrialized hunter-gatherer people have had stratified societies that were unequal to the point that women were treated like slaves. |
"You can't evolve...complex psychological concepts." Isn't that the whole point of evolutionary psychology? Well, oxytocin is a mammalian hormone which has been around about 500 million yrs, according to wiki. Why did it "manifest itself" in humans only a few thousand yr ago? Group marriage existed long before pair bonding. What hormonal or psychological mechanism explains group marriage? |
Oh, and as for tribes that practice the domination of women, the Chukchi (along with most other northern Eskimo/Aleutian tribes), the Chenchu (along with many other tribes in India), the Yanomamo, the Sioux (native american tribe), and many of the Pacific Coastal native american tribes as well. I'm an anthropology student, I didn't even have to look those up. Many, many, many hunter-gatherer tribes were very clearly patriarchal, often having practices such as bride kidnapping (or larger scale raiding for women) and considering women to have a status as slaves. We cannot demonize or idealize these past tribes on Marxist principles because Marxist principals are not even capable of explaining them fully. |
There has never been a time when humans were not modifying plants and plant populations for their own gain. |
Also, the tribes with the least access to farmable resources, the northern Arctic tribes, tend to be those with the most rigid, most patriarchal gender roles. Farming cannot be automatically linked to patriarchal gender roles. |
For example, in polyandrous relationships (one woman, many men), usually it is either the first-born man, or the man who was favored initially as the primary husband, who actually has children with the women (genetically this has been tested), while the other men serve as economic helpers. In polygynous relationships this is similar... though men in many cultures prefer polygynous marriage because it gives them more children (thus increasing their evolutionary fitness), there is often hidden conflict between men and women over this, because really, only a preferred wife in a polygynous marriage stands to gain from it, the rest of the wives actually do worse in those relationships in general than in pair-bonded relationships. |
As a result, a simple change in material conditions, as Marx predicted, is not likely to change that as fundamentally as Marx thought. |
If this was not true, Marxism could not be true in any way. If humans had no psychological mechanisms that allowed capitalism to develop, it wouldn't have. If we weren't capable of the abstract thought needed to develop financial systems for example, then we wouldn't have. Cats, dogs, and manatees do not have the pre-conditions of any kind of complex economy in their minds, and thus, surprise, they have not formed complex economies... That is not to say that capitalism is the natural end result of any kind of process, it is just to say that, as Marx argued with his theory of CULTURAL evolution, capital is a response to certain technological, material (and ecological and psychological) conditions. |
I see you don't believe in archaeology or the ability to understand the pre-contact history of any tribes either... Ethnoarchaeology and other research has demonstrably proved that, yes, these tribes were patriarchal before contact. |
Oh, and yes, the domestic cultivation of plants is exactly what I was referring to. Hunter-gatherer tribes not only picked plants, but replanted those that they saw as favorable in order to encourage continued growth of plants with that quality. It was hunter-gatherers that caused corn to evolve from the relatively non-productive grass that it was into the major food source that it is today. It was hunter-gatherers that bred the poison out of the earliest potato species, and it was actually hunter-gatherers that bred stronger poison INTO many species in South America (the poison repelled other animals, and could then be processed out by hunter-gatherers). These are ancient processes that go back as far as humans do. |
If you don't even want to see those arguments, then there is not really any argument here to be had. |
"As internet arguments become less and less productive, the probability of someone invoking postmodernism exponentially increases until science has ceased to become relevant and the nature of the argument has completely devolved into a matter of opinions about perceived opinions." |
Life is too short to bother with the academic fad that was poststructuralism and which ceased to be relevant (not that it ever really was for historians) to working academics in empirically minded fields after the backlash against such crap in the 1990s, let alone to try to parse her godawful, unintelligable prose. |
Given that your epistle, here, is apparently a defense of Butler's thesis - an academic thesis penned by an academic, for academic purposes, and for a niche academic audience - you clearly seem to think so. |
That the pomo arguments were tried and tested and found to be of little practical value. |
I have no idea what this means. |