Comment by Andrew Tait — January 17, 2010 @ 12:18 pm
I’ve just read Guns Germs and Steel and I consider Blaut’s
critique to be insupportable and insignificant.
The subtext of his argument is that non-Western peoples are
somehow more noble. There is nothing scientific about such a view.
My own view is that we see in Diamond’s work yet another example
of modern science fleshing out the rough drafts laid out by Marx
and Engels. Diamond refers repeatedly to the stratified societies
that result from settled agriculture as ‘kleptocracies’ and
provides an abundance of evidence for this from all over the
world. It is remarkable that what was once an ideological
contention of Marxists is now so firmly established by layer upon
layer of scientific evidence.
Diamond has weaknesses though; one stems from a latent commitment
to Hobbesian liberalism and the other from a lack of faith in
revolutionary change.
In the first case he goes to unwarranted lengths to emphasise all
instances of violence in pre-class societies, drawing extensively
on what was probably the most violent region in the world – the
Papuan island. I would argue that three factors – low-yield
agriculture, topographic barriers and a lack of trade routes – led
over millenia to the establishment of geographically fixed,
linguistically separate peoples with a disproportionately high
level of warfare. Diamond, either because his extensive experience
in PNG has made it a norm for him or because of ideological
predilections, suggests that the PNG experience shows that the
transition to stratified ‘kleptocracy’ brought with it an escape
from the constant threat of homicide (cf Hobbes’ state of nature,
where life was ‘nasty brutish and short’). So far as I understand,
while primitive communism (as Marx and Engels referred to
hunter/gatherer societies) was not paradise on earth, in most
cases it offered living standards that surpassed agricultural
class societies but was unable to resist these societies.
Diamond’s second weakness is most obvious in the (very dreary)
book ‘Collapse’, which is an appeal to the powers-that-be to learn
from history and transcend private greed. What naivety! What a
contrast from Marx and Engels!
On the whole, it is astounding and worrying that an intelligent,
well-educated scientist could be unaware that his work on the
evolution of human societies follows so closely that of such
well-known thinkers as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but, on the
positive side, it is testament to the continued vigour of the
scientific community and the intellectual appetite of the reading
public that works such as Guns Germs and Steel are produced.
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Comment by patello — February 2, 2010 @ 5:37 am
Dear Andrew, don’t you feel it strange to see that remarkable
scientific committment to (alleged) historical materialism
coalesce in naive and mainstream political conclusions? Don’t you
question yourself on this? Are you really sure that Marx and
Engels method was that of Diamond? For all that you wrote, its
seems you have no idea of what historical materialism actually is.
First, Marx and Engels, the former in particular, openly declared
their works on precapitalist forms of production to be mere
sketches, not complete and reliable models of world-historical
development. I won’t bother quoting what every serious reader of
Marx perfecly knows. Marx is fully aware of the methodological,
and so -in the last instance- political, implications of being
focused on Europe. He repeatedly affirmed that viable analyses for
Europe can be totally misleading for other places, where in turn
the same macro-processes could manifest themselves through
different micro-processes, requiring different logical connections
to be explained. Different places can well present different
degree of the same phenomena without being so as self-exclusive
alternatives. Integration within different macro-regions of the
world means what a “failure” there is not the opposite of the
“success” here, but its partial backside. It is not the overall
comparative method which is invalidated here, but the poor, static
way in which Diamond uses it. There is no clear understanding of
the methodological dimension of spatiality, let alone of the
concept of “scale”, around which the whole marxist debate around
origins of capitalist development has organized, with different
degrees of awareness, in the last decades. World-systems scholars,
comparative historical-sociologists, critical geography, all of
these branches understood that to vary the scale -that is, the
unit of analysis- means to make different assumptions about what
is given, what moves, where reductionism is allowed, where
dialectical complexity reign, and so on. In turn, this is a
political imbued operation, as proved by the very different
conclusions of those schools scholars, from Brenner to Wallerstein
right to Skocpol and Tilly. Indeed, the very few authors that
recognized the necessity to use different scales of analysis, like
Harvey and Arrighi, are those who better understood the complexity
of the topic.
Failure or persistent neglect to recognize this whole
methodological problem is a common feature of most litterature on
supposed “failures” or “successes” of *whatever_you_want*. Indeed,
that method in itself is quite an empty box which everyone can
fill with different propositions. Depending to the cultural
trends, the subject whose success/failure is to be explained can
be an economic model (“Asian capitalism”, “New economy”, “Third
Italy”, “Fordism” etc) as well as a tecnical innovation
(“information society”, “flat world”, “risk society” etc.) et
cetera. The more this production of empty names continues, the
more a marxist has to question himself about the role played by
the method in this inflation of concepts.
Diamond is indeed born out of this anti-relational mechanicistic
trend, whose last field of application is that of ecology,
perfectly on time with the overall cultural neo-malthusian turn
that commenced with postmodern appraisal of Heidegger, “return to
nature” and so on, widening more and more at the point that today
the ecological common sense can provide both the
“imperfect_human_nature” kind of Hayekian argument to legitimate
the crisis while banning every attempt to political action as
utopian perfectibilism and a new cultural framework for the
enterprenurial and financial community to forsee and build up the
new fronteer of green tecnologies and eco-businness. On this
point, in note in passing, it is striking to note how the left has
taken to ecology in an unprecedented acritical way, so that today,
for many leftists the only path to the critique of political
economy consists in a sterile stagnationist pessimism about the
capabilities of capital to produce sustainable commodities. From
Schumpeter to Heidegger and Latouche, the worst change of
bibliography ever in marxism.
In Diamond, we see the reversal of the most famous insight given
by Marx about human nature. Lightyears away from the irrational
holism of dialectical materialism which pretended to fuse physical
nature and human nature, Marx stated that these two spheres are
progressively intertwining themselves, albeit remaining
discernible theoretical objects notwithstanding their evolution.
The partial interpenetration of “first” and “second” nature
reflects itself in the method of historical matherialism, which
conceive the progress of human being as the progressive social
signifiance of its relations to nature. Social, that is, under the
field of increasing possibilities out of wich a single determined
material history emerges. An historical materialist account of
human societies must therefore understand nature as a relative
residual, in the sense that its presence and barriers do evolves
along with human societies so facing them with new problems, but
in the end the solution given, good or bad, is less and less
linearly linked with the initial signal of nature. It is more and
more up to humans to decide. This does not ensure that the
response will be always the right one, and maybe nor that over the
long term a self-correcting mechanism will suggest it, albeit on
this many progressive ecologists and biologists like Levins and
Lewontin do point out that the integration of human “artificial”
growth on ecological systems is a two-side process, implying an
equal correction of living support systems to human action. But
still, Diamond’s argument is pretty much the reversal of this. He
posits a bunch of hard worked environmental data at the beginning
of history, using the rest of the book to linearly unfold the
argument. This emphasis on ecological overdetermination over
millennia is not only the opposite of Marx’s well known humanistic
theory of emancipation, but run against his idea of
overdetermination too. Is not by accident, for example, that Marx
reflected about the weight of the past when speaking about
politics, not about nature.
To conclude, I’m not repudiating ecology in itself of course, and
it is clear to me that those kind of ecological determinists like
Diamond are expressions of an ambryonal process of integration of
environment in a too often “idealistic” social history, and still
today some publications signals a good trend towards lesser
determinism and more careful and equilibrate choices (Kenneth
Pomeranz’s are worth mentioning). But Diamond’s naturalism has
nothing to do with marxist historical analysis, in that the
relations to nature of human being are described as determining
-and not progressively being freed by- the set of medium concepts
-surplus product and labor, classes, urban-rural conflict, and so
on- which Marx constructed to insert a sort of “multiplier of
sociality” into natural history. Marx is far away, both from
methodology and political implications of Diamond’s books.
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