And really this dismissive cave-dweller-line reminds me of nothing so much as those routinely heard from free-market ideologues or indoctrinated college sophomores. You know the song: they start out with some confident and vast claim about "human nature," you cite easy counter-examples from the vast canvas of societies that have actually existed and =wham= their only response is, "Oh, so you want us to all go back to living like medieval artisans/Trobriand Islanders/[_fill in blank from anywhere/time_] now do you??" It's amazing: _they_ start with the generalizations about humanity (which happen to dovetail with capitalist ethos), you point out concrete ways that history doesn't support their generalizations, and suddenly you've become the romantic utopian.
Usually such exchanges revolve around the fantasies of "free"-marketers who go on about the naturalness of laissez-faire societies. You point out how the so-called "natural" mechanisms of laissez-faire economies were the result of self-conscious and coercive government policies and how capitalist societies have always required state-coercion. You further qualify their anti- "state-intervention" fantasies by providing elementary information, such as that furnished in _SAE_, about how societies which actually have been stateless have gone about things. Or you point out how, in spite of the endless variety of stateless societies (some aspects very attractive, some *not*at*all*), what they've all shared is deeming the market-ethos which in bourgeois societies is encouraged towards members of one's own community, as only appropriate towards those furthest outside one's social realm (cf. MS's distinctions between spheres of generalized reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and out-group market-like competition).
You point out these basic aspects of human history, but still you're the utopian while they're the clear-eyed realists. As I said, I understand why free-market advocates play this kind of "back-to-stone-age" card, but why listers want to go that way is a mystery.
Is it such a mental strain to separate such a basic point, that historically most human societies have not been motivated by the values that motivate bourgeois societies, from the equally incontrovertable fact that yes, history has happened? that colonization, plantation-slavery, enclosure-systems, vagrancy-laws, sweat-shop labor, state-capitalism (the only kind) and industrializatrion--that all of it's happened? and that in light of this history of the last few centuries nobody should now have to die of malaria or starvation, but neither should people be forced to sign-on to bourgeois myths and behaviors in order to be entitled to this? Isn't moving towards a world where that's possible what being on the left is about? What am I missing here?
perplexed, Maureen