Gar Lipow <lipowg at sprintmail.com> Subject: Chales Brown:
> Ancient society's mode of production would be just as vulnerable to shirkers, cheaters, violent people, yet, for tens of thousands of years custom ( not law backed by the special bodies of armed men which is the state) was sufficient to socialize people to cooperate, to communize for the good of the social whole. There is no reason to believe that people could not be similarly socialized in a society with higher technique, especially if society were truly not exploitat
Maybe no special bodies - but we certainly don't know that people who sufficiently violated social norms were not given a good beating. More to the, pointa, ny hunter gatherer societies we know of at least had some form of "coventry" - some type of exile as a sanction for violating social norms. Given the interpendence of forager living, the chances of survival for someone suddenly reduced to a lone monad are very small indeed.
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CB: Yea, I agree. They probably did have punishment.
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Incidentally organized violence did NOT start with the Neolithic or with the invention of agriculture. There is definite archeological evidence of violent clashes between small Paleolithic groups.
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CB: Yes. I think the claim by Engels is that standing bodies of armed men started in the period when agriculture gave rise to surpluses. There is no evidence that the clashes you mention were between standing bodies of armed personnel.
Engels says self-acting armed organizations of the population existed before surpluses, which is consistent with the evidence you mention.
^^^^^^^ If your point is the lack of need for armies and maybe the lack of need for police forces -fine. A socialist society not having to fight off capitalist societies could almost certainly do without a miliary. (I would say that the border clashed between the former Soviet Union and China are good evidence against them being socialist.) As to being able to do without a police force; I am going to make an argument that a socialist society could do without a police force, but probably would not want to.
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CB: The state ( armies) does not whither away until communism. The Soviet Union and China were/are very early socialism, nonetheless future socialist countries should be able to avoid even border clashes.
^^^^^^^ I don't think any human society has ever done without coercion. What we may be able eliminate is an extreme hierachy of coercion, divided into coercers and coerced, and instead have an egalitarian society where decision making and coercive power is divided more or less equally - where it is mutal.
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CB: I agree there has always been coercion. Adults coerce children , for one.
Right now I would say we should work on eliminating standing bodies of armed personnel who coerce for exploiting ruling classes. If we clear that away, we can see what other coercion can be eliminated.
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What it comes down to is that we don't really know what human nature is. We know that there is likely to be such a thing as human nature. After all bees have bee nature, sea-gulls have a sea-gull nature, pigs have a pig nature. It is extremely unlikely that humans don't have a human nature that they are infinitely plasic. Are humans plastic enough to practice coopration and altruism? Of course we are; there are plenty of exmaples. Are humans capable of being selfish, aggressive, and violent? We have plenty of examples of that too.
Assume the best, that people tend more toward cooperation and altruisim than selfishness and violence. (I actually do tend to assume this.) Even so, we had better do something about the occassional asshole who rather get by on aggression and selfishness.
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CB: I'm not one of these people who thinks human nature is a total mystery.
But to your discussion here, I think the distinguishing difference between humans and other species is the level of our sociality. So, to me communism defines human nature. It was cooperation and altruism that gave homo sapiens sapiens the big advantage over other species. Language, symbolling etc. have their significance in that they extend human sociality ( communism) exponentially.
HUMAN NATURE = COMMUNISM
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For example suppose we are living in a mixed tech anarchist utopia. Chuck0 lives in a log cabin, and cultivates his garden because he is not fond of hi-tech. I live an apartment in a highrise with 500 cable channels, and work in chip making factory to pay for it because that is my preference.
Some asshole comes along, grabs all the food from Chuck0's garden, then breaks into my apartment in the hi-rise and grabs my TV.
Now we might not need a police force to take care of this. Chuck0 and myself and all the others the asshole has ripped off might get-together and surround the asshole. Maybe we use violoence and beat the shit out of him. Or maybe we are really cruel and hug-bomb him, and sing Kumbaya until he surrenders..
BuT here is the question. Are Chuck0 and our myself, and our neighbors really the best qualified to deal with something like this. I mean do we have any experties that would let us track the asshole down? And what if he is part of a group of organized assholes?
Let us go back to the division of labor implied before the asshold came along. Chuck0 grows food (maybe for himself, maybe for himself and others.) I have a brown thumb and cannot even grow ferns. I work in a chip factory - which definitely requires some skill and training. Chuck0, not liking chip factories has never chosen to learn this speciality. On the other hand we both sweep our own floors and clean our own toilets.
If Chuck0 and I and our neighbors deal with the asshole - this implies that dealing with this type is not a specialized skill. It is a chore, like cleaning toilets and sweeping floors that everybody (excluding those with certain disabilities) have to take care of. But I would argue that it is not that simple a thing. Policework, even in a socialist society, is a skill. Just like chip-making requires people with specialized skill, so does policework. And it is likely that a socialist society, even an anarchist society will want policework done by specialists with the talent and skill it requires.
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CB: My general response to this is that , unfortunately, Chuck , you and I have be born in a class divided society, and it is pretty much impossible for us to simulate what will be possible in raising pretty nearly 100% of the population to cooperate after three generations or so of communist society, with no idea of bourgeois/class society consciousness. So, arseholds would be extremely rare.
I don't think it is possible to project two typical life styles from today onto "then". The profound and radical changes of society as a whole will make individuals radically different too.
Also, not to knock Chuck ( or the hypothetical Chuck you pose), but I do think that living all by yourself is the antithesis of our unique human quality ,which is our sociality or communality. People raised in communist society would have profound consciousness of this.