Scholars claim that large cities require a ruling class. But over 100,000 people lived in Teotihuacan (Mexico) around 300 CE. Their city seems to have been intentionally egalitarian. Small households lived in comfortable apartments in larger compounds (ruins seen here). They had common areas and extensive murals that depicted people all the same size. There is no sign of kings, priests, or top-down administrators. This social organization lasted about 250 years before internal contradictions led it to disintegrate.
“A New History of Humanity” and a New Communist Future
Many of our friends are eager to read a new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The authors are an archaeologist and an anarchist anthropologist. They analyze research results in their fields from the last thirty years. They call into question much of what we think we know about how people lived before the so-called “Neolithic Revolution” about 12,000 years ago.
We have been asking the wrong questions, they argue. We have been misled by influential European writers of the 18th century “Enlightenment.” As capitalism rose to dominate politics and culture, its intellectuals (like Hobbes and Rousseau) created myths that continue to reinforce capitalist ideas today.
When Engels wrote The Origin of Private Property, the Family, and the State in 1884, he relied on the best scientific evidence then available. “[Lewis Henry] MORGAN is the first man who, with expert knowledge, has attempted to introduce a definite order into the history of primitive man,” Engels wrote. “So long as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his classification will undoubtedly remain in force.”
Morgan thought that all humans, everywhere, evolved through the same stages: Savagery (hunting, fishing, gathering), Barbarism (agriculture), and Civilization (industry). His language smacks of racism and reflects imperialism. But there’s much more wrong with it than that.
Dawn of Everything contains over 500 pages of important additional material that render Morgan’s entire classification system obsolete. Evidence comes from archaeological sites like the early city of Taljanky in today’s Ukraine. The northern California coast. Tenochtitlan (Mexico), pre-agricultural Japan, Madagascar and more.
Also, new discoveries in Egypt and the “Fertile Crescent.” And 17th-century first-hand reports on conversations between Jesuit missionaries and indigenous philosophers in the northeastern American woodlands.
Why does this matter to us? Because it extends and deepens our critique of technological determinism. It offers new insights into how humans have made our own history (though not just as we please or under circumstances we choose). It helps us understand the possibility of creating a new communist society.
And it reframes issues in ways that can help us resolve debates like whether communism will ever have a “state.” Or whether communism would have to organize people into small self-sufficient villages instead of cities.
It helps explain why it is so central to our political line that in communism everyone will be welcome everywhere. It gives powerful reasons to reject the very idea of “property” handed down from Roman law.
This book does not ask all the questions we do. It certainly does not answer even those it asks. There are serious problems with its analytic framework. No Spanish translation exists yet. And it is not an easy read.
That’s why comrades and friends are starting a book club to read and discuss The Dawn of Everything together. Our focus will be on the “big questions” it raises. We look forward to reporting on our discussions in Red Flag.
—Comrades in Los Angeles (USA)