Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[John Edmundson via Marxism]

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More important than the evils or otherwise of the invention of agriculture
is, where to from here? Hunter-gathering did have an impact (extinction of
megafauna - including in Australia) and, as Mark pointed out, even in
America, it did deplete native species like bison. In New Zealand, the moa
were extinct within a very short time (only a few hundred years) of the
first human arrivals. And we've had this discussion before. But, despite
vast traditional knowledge, neither hunter-gatherers nor early farmers,
knew what longterm impact they were having or would have over an extended
period to the extent that we now know about their experience or our own. We
can't survive as hunter gatherers with our current population and I doubt
many of us would want to. The necessary knowledge now exists though to farm
in an efficient and sustainable manner, feed the world and retire a lot of
existing farmland, which means our planet can be a much more pleasant
place, not just for us, but for currently endangered species. The issue is
political, not technical. Is that solution possible under capitalism?
Possibly, but I wouldn't count on it. How though do we build a movement
that makes clear that the urgent need of the planet can best, and
permanently, be resolved by a socialism?

John

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 11:16 AM Ratbag Media via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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> *
>
> I'd be very wary about ruling that 'agriculture' is/was an advance on
> hunter gathering. Aside from the fact that both systems so often
> co-exist in the same region (such as Central America during the time
> of the Maya culture), in places like New Guinea agriculture was
> embraced initially 7,000 – 10,000 years ago.
> http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p53311/pdf/history.pdf
> But it used to be argued that across the Torres Strait --despite the
> example --  Australian aborigines chose not to farm, when in fact they
> were the first farmers on the planet.
> Indeed, when you look at the phenomenon of agriculture it all depends
> on what is at hand in way of plants...and access to water.
> And how you manage it.
> Across the Mediterranean, it's tempting to rule that the agricultural
> protocols that grew out of the Fertile Crescent were an ecological
> disaster.  A feature that even Frederick Engels noted.This was the
> price paid for successive civilisations.
> Was it the wheat and olives or was it the plough?
> Similarly, you cannot separate the supposed difference between the
> agricultural and 'hunter gatherer'  lifestyle without reference to
> changes in climate.Nor can you infer that the 'hunter gatherer' didn't
> know what their patch of existence was capable of.
> In that sense 'agriculture' isn't so much an 'invention' but an extension.
> A different approach to stewardship.
> The real question, I guess, isn't so much the invention of
> agriculture, but the invention of surplus.
> In my region -- in Gubi Gubi country -- it is very clear that the land
> was bountiful and the culture rich. That there was no reason to
> ratchet up the demands made of the landscape.
> Disaster struck, of course, and I can stand on the beach here and look
> out to where that tragedy began -- where the Brits first arrived to
> this place then invaded.
> But let's get this clear: aside from the gun, what savaged the Gubi
> Gubi economy was disease. Then the dispossession.
> What's happening now -- across Australia --  is an attempt to embrace
> Aboriginal landcare practices. This may be as a small movement at the
> moment but  with fire management, for instance, there is a major
> deference. There is also a major debate growing around the traditional
> practice of indigenous management of river systems.
> You can't  live in a land for 60,000+ years without knowing what's what.
> Indeed, there is no future -- no future -- for Australian agriculture
> without learning  -- and applying --from the Aboriginal tradition of
> what was supposedly 'hunter gathering'.
>
> dave riley
>
>
>
>
>
> dave riley
> .
>
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-- 
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves 

Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Ratbag Media via Marxism]

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I'd be very wary about ruling that 'agriculture' is/was an advance on
hunter gathering. Aside from the fact that both systems so often
co-exist in the same region (such as Central America during the time
of the Maya culture), in places like New Guinea agriculture was
embraced initially 7,000 – 10,000 years ago.
http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p53311/pdf/history.pdf
But it used to be argued that across the Torres Strait --despite the
example --  Australian aborigines chose not to farm, when in fact they
were the first farmers on the planet.
Indeed, when you look at the phenomenon of agriculture it all depends
on what is at hand in way of plants...and access to water.
And how you manage it.
Across the Mediterranean, it's tempting to rule that the agricultural
protocols that grew out of the Fertile Crescent were an ecological
disaster.  A feature that even Frederick Engels noted.This was the
price paid for successive civilisations.
Was it the wheat and olives or was it the plough?
Similarly, you cannot separate the supposed difference between the
agricultural and 'hunter gatherer'  lifestyle without reference to
changes in climate.Nor can you infer that the 'hunter gatherer' didn't
know what their patch of existence was capable of.
In that sense 'agriculture' isn't so much an 'invention' but an extension.
A different approach to stewardship.
The real question, I guess, isn't so much the invention of
agriculture, but the invention of surplus.
In my region -- in Gubi Gubi country -- it is very clear that the land
was bountiful and the culture rich. That there was no reason to
ratchet up the demands made of the landscape.
Disaster struck, of course, and I can stand on the beach here and look
out to where that tragedy began -- where the Brits first arrived to
this place then invaded.
But let's get this clear: aside from the gun, what savaged the Gubi
Gubi economy was disease. Then the dispossession.
What's happening now -- across Australia --  is an attempt to embrace
Aboriginal landcare practices. This may be as a small movement at the
moment but  with fire management, for instance, there is a major
deference. There is also a major debate growing around the traditional
practice of indigenous management of river systems.
You can't  live in a land for 60,000+ years without knowing what's what.
Indeed, there is no future -- no future -- for Australian agriculture
without learning  -- and applying --from the Aboriginal tradition of
what was supposedly 'hunter gathering'.

dave riley





dave riley
.

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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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I'm not referring to the violent onslaught against the native peoples but
"the Great Dying."  The arrival of European (and African) diseases cut
through native populations years ahead of the advancing line of white
settlement.

Entire sections of the Ohio valley that had supported an extensive
population before imploded to a fraction of what they had been.  Whites
generally encountered no resident native populations in much of West
Virginia and Kentucky, though there's plenty of archaeological evidence
that there had been earlier. This population collapse was even more
dramatic in the Deep South.  The expedition of Hernando de Soto (ca.
1540-41) recorded the presence of dozens of stable, well-populated towns.
Only a few were recorded when La Salle came through the region (around
1680) came through the same area.

My point was that the game and the fish populations bounced back and then
some.  Buffalo turned up in parts of the country east of the Mississippi
where it apparently hadn't been for many generations, if ever.  The first
whites in this part of the river talked about fish so thick in the river
that you couldn't paddle a canoe without hitting them.

For a concise overview of this, see Roger Kennedy's _Hidden Cities_,
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results=Kennedy=%22hidden+cities%22==

But new material on this has been coming out for years, the latest I
encountered being
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/21/19 3:58 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
The problem with any American examples is that Lewis and Clark or others 
of the first whites recording their impressions of an area new to them 
were actually looking at the result of several generations of collapsing 
human populations.  This isn't to dismiss the anecdotal evidence, but to 
put it into context.


Mark, if you're referring to genocide against the Indians, I am not sure 
this was the case in 1804. Except for the Northeast, Indians were still 
pretty strong socially especially the major groups like the Comanches, 
the Blackfoot and the Lakota. Can you say a bit more?

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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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The problem with any American examples is that Lewis and Clark or others of
the first whites recording their impressions of an area new to them were
actually looking at the result of several generations of collapsing human
populations.  This isn't to dismiss the anecdotal evidence, but to put it
into context.

On the other hand, even the earliest agriculture--and what came with
it--had a serious impact on the environment.  George Perkins Marsh compiled
a lot of information on the deforestation of the Levant for his _Man and
Nature_ (1864).  Recent work also indicates large populations and
agriculture in central Asia contributed to its desertification.

Not that we have any choice at this stage.

Cheers,
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/21/19 11:54 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:

[I should point out here that Marshal Sahlins has been thoroughly diced and
taken down by many anthropologists.


I doubt that any of them have debunked the idea that when game and 
plants were plentiful, there was plenty of leisure time. All you need to 
do is read Lewis and Clark to get an idea of what a Garden of Eden this 
continent was. I think that dwelling on the ǃKung is not useful.


---
Sunday 1st Sept. 1805.We set out early in a fine morning, and 
travelled on nearly a west course. We found here the greatest quantity 
and best service berries, I had ever seen before; and abundance of 
choak-cherries. There is also a small bush grows in this part of the 
country, about 6 inches high, which bears a bunch of small purple 
berries. Some call it mountain holly; [4] the fruit is of an acid taste. 
We are much better supplied with water than I expected; and cross 
several fine springs among the mountains through which we pass. At noon 
some rain fell, and the day continued cloudy. About the middle of the 
day Capt. Clarke's blackman's feet became so sore that he had to ride on 
horseback. At 3 o'clock we came to a creek, [5] where there was fine 
grass and we halted to let our horses eat. There are a great number of 
fish in this creek. After we halted the weather became cloudy, and a 
considerable quantity of rain fell. We therefore concluded to remain 
where we were all night, having come this day 18 miles. Our hunters 
killed a deer, and we caught 5 fish.

---

As I pointed out in my original post on these matters, the article I 
referred to was ahistorical. Hunting and gathering did not lend itself 
to intensive agriculture. A society that could produce an agricultural 
surplus was capable of overpowering one that was based on it. That is 
the story of the empires of the Western hemisphere that gained hegemony: 
the Aztecs, the Incas and the Mayans.


You can get a sense of the resentment some anthropologists feel toward 
these rudimentary empires from reading Thomas Patterson's "Inventing 
Western Civilization". Patterson is unstinting in his portrayal of the 
Inca ruling elite. The quest for power consumes them. They are either 
fighting with each other in wars of succession as characters in a 
Shakespeare play do, or with outlying tribes who resist assimilation. 
This unflattering portrait is a reaction, one must suppose, to the 
tendency of "indigenists" to view Inca civilization as enlightened and 
humane. It is one thing for an archaeologist to admire their artifacts, 
but Patterson's sympathies are with the people who were under the thumb. 
The odd thing about civilization is that it takes societies with 
strictly defined divisions of labor to produce museum quality artifacts. 
As Freud said, the purpose of civilization is repression. Such divisions 
are inevitably the result of having somebody pointing a gun or spear at 
you, either implicitly or explicitly.



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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[DW via Marxism]

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Thanks to Dave Riley (a comrade from the FB group "Soil Alliance") for
setting or beginning to set the record straight. His point *"Soil
disturbance through the invention and use of the plough has to be seen as a
key mistake"* hit's the nail on the head and the fact that this is only
really noted by agro-anthropologists (anthropologists and historians with a
strong understanding of agricultural techniques). Agriculture was a *great
and wonderful* advancement over hunter-gathering.

[I should point out here that Marshal Sahlins has been thoroughly diced and
taken down by many anthropologists. There *is* a debate on Shalin's
anthropological projections. He by no means represents any sort of
consensus].

When talking to agronomists who look back at ancient societies of all sorts
(including the most prevalent for thousands of years in the New World,
those that engaged in both hunting and gathering AND agriculture) it is
indeed *how* early agricultural societies farmed, not that they farmed at
all. Most of the agronomists who study this do indeed point out that the
plow was the key instrument that causes all sorts of problems primarily
being that of soil infertility and soil runoff. By exposing soils to the
sun, one kills off the bacteria and fungi that completes the symbiotic
relationship between the sun, soil, plants as cover crops, domesticated
animals, and humans. Many would argue that this is the single biggest
blight on humanity when it started farming.

David Walters
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/20/19 9:06 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the 
invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the 
serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe 
it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all.


In 2006 two Indian fishermen, in a drunken sleep aboard their little 
boat, drifted over the reef and fetched up on the shore of North 
Sentinel Island. They were promptly killed by the inhabitants. Their 
bodies are still there: the helicopter that went to collect them was 
driven away by a hail of arrows and spears. The Sentinelese do not 
welcome trespassers. Only very occasionally have they been lured down to 
the beach of their tiny island home by gifts of coconuts and only once 
or twice have they taken these gifts without sending a shower of arrows 
in return.


The quote above is from the Economist article that John Imani posted.

I can't say I am surprised that someone writing for the Economist 
portrayed the people of North Sentinel as "savage". This year a 
self-appointed Christian Missionary was killed by these "savages". Here 
is why. They were determined to be free of the real savages who had 
decimated their people for the longest time.


The Guardian, Nov. 30, 2018
Sentinel Island's 'peace-loving’ tribe had centuries of reasons to fear 
missionary


From the exiled king of Belgium to the Primrose freighter in 1981, 
outsiders have regretted contact with the Sentinelese – as have the 
islanders themselves


by Michael Safi

After a few days stuck in the reef, a watchman reported seeing a group 
emerge from the jungle on the island a few hundred metres away. The 
sailor’s relief at the sight of a possible rescue party ebbed as the men 
came into view: nearly naked, carrying spears and bows and arrows that 
they waved in the direction of the ship.


“Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are 
making two or three wooden boats,” the Primrose’s captain radioed to his 
headquarters in Hong Kong. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All 
crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”


The same tribe killed American missionary John Allen Chau on 17 
November. The crew of the Primrose survived. The surging swell repelled 
the tribespeople’s boats, while the strong winds kept blowing their 
arrows off the mark, according to an account by the author and historian 
Adam Goodheart. After three terrifying days – the crew keeping vigil 
with pipes, flares and other makeshift weapons – an Indian navy boat 
winched the stranded sailors to safety. The Primrose still lies where it 
ran aground 37 years ago.


Chau would have seen the ship’s wreckage as he circumnavigated North 
Sentinel Island the evening of 14 November, on a boat with five 
fishermen whom police say he paid 25,000 rupees (£275) to smuggle him there.


Like the Primrose incident, Chau’s apparent murder as he tried to preach 
to the Sentinelese – in breach of Indian law and advice that exposure to 
foreign pathogens could kill them – has fuelled fascination with one of 
the world’s most isolated communities. And among the most misunderstood, 
according to the handful of anthropologists and historians who have 
observed them.


Encounters between the tribe, loosely estimated to number 100 people, 
and the outside world are a violent catalogue. In 1974, a member of a 
National Geographic crew filming a documentary on the island was hit in 
the leg with an arrow.


The following year, the exiled king of Belgium reportedly aborted his 
visit when a single, armed tribesman emerged from the jungle and waved 
his bow at the craft. In 2006, two men looking for flotsam on North 
Sentinel ran aground on the sand, and were hacked apart with axes. 
Police said this week their bodies were hung from bamboo poles and 
displayed to the ocean “like scarecrows”.


Yet those experienced with the Sentinelese reject the idea they are 
inherently aggressive. “They are a peace-loving people,” TN Pandit, an 
anthropologist who conducted one of the first successful meetings with 
the tribe in 1991, told an Indian news outlet this week.


“Their hostility is a sign of great insecurity,” agrees Vivek Rae, a 
former chief administrator of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the 
Indian territory that includes the Sentinelese home.


Often characterised as a kind of irrational barbarism, their extreme 
suspicion of outsiders may be well-founded. “It has been passed down 
through generations,” Pandit says.


Centuries ago, the Andaman archipelago was a magnet for Burmese slave 
traders who seized members of its four 

[Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/20/19 7:22 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:

On 7/20/19 11:58 AM, John A Imani via Marxism wrote:

The U. of Utah security system hiccuped on the link that John supplied. 
Try using 
#https://secure-web.cisco.com/1Z6oEdFkIPDCDhBB6OZ95XddVw24FzSEkl2TSKLpuzDwZ8kv3szjMZ6AbOtOFvGSQx5DFtKxpw-lwVkEkL3_jdWNpUfFnGevdsGgXOuBZ3hp6sEY3WdYqPAyNTIcP7ai5NttQ7ELFqWs96d5UwoeGgYs873zxkCPoWwwi-udPTpFzL-EFYwZhdunUSDxLzET0Denme0Ha9dDnFVPdg9kCCVt5jlLh-S9gldyOq8UDnuCGp-cZTwU2lVTbO40NoKSl49L5mQPkJIizaYfDerzM2wUb7vE2hrReTNaLTe5y6_Z0TOYIMJLTj-1K9IPMdiS1xKBYD1gHFRkCOpfc6davyZD3KWnDr8SpReYw5DqFeehdZTXe93v5wFMVhG_3Q1Dd/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fchristmas-specials%2F2007%2F12%2F19%2Fnoble-or-savage# 
after removing the pound signs. If you run into a paywall problem, 
contact me or John offlist.





Fuck!

That didn't work.

I might as well send the entire article.

The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden 
that some suggest


HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as 
hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of 
agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with 
gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the 
Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who 
still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking 
specimens--strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small 
plant-fibre belt round the waist--they are the very model of the noble 
savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been 
isolated since the very first expansion out of Africa more than 60,000 
years ago.


About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called 
agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never 
recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin 
deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank 
by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. 
So was agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race", 
as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at 
the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?


Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of 
Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had 
originated in Africa and had colonised first their own continent, then 
Asia, Australia and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the 
Americas. They had spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They 
painted pictures, decorated their bodies and believed in spirits. They 
traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, told 
stories and prepared herbal medicines.


They were "hunter-gatherers". On the whole the men hunted and the women 
gathered: a sexual division of labour is still universal among 
non-farming people and was probably not shared by their Homo erectus 
predecessors. This enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever trick 
because it combines quality with reliability.


Why change? In the late 1970s Mark Cohen, an archaeologist, first 
suggested that agriculture was born of desperation, rather than 
inspiration. Evidence from the Fertile Crescent seems to support him. 
Rising human population density, combined perhaps with a cooling, drying 
climate, left the Natufian hunter-gatherers of the region short of 
acorns, gazelles and wild grass seeds. Somebody started trying to 
preserve and enhance a field of chickpeas or wheat-grass and soon 
planting, weeding, reaping and threshing were born.


Quite independently, people took the same step in at least six other 
parts of the world over the next few thousand years: the Yangzi valley, 
the central valley of New Guinea, Mexico, the Andes, West Africa and the 
Amazon basin. And it seems that Eden came to an end. Not only had 
hunter-gatherers enjoyed plenty of protein, not much fat and ample 
vitamins in their diet, but it also seems they did not have to work very 
hard. The Hadza of Tanzania "work" about 14 hours a week, the !Kung of 
Botswana not much more.


The first farmers were less healthy than the hunter-gatherers had been 
in their heyday. Aside from their shorter stature, they had more 
skeletal wear and tear from the hard work, their teeth rotted more, they 
were short of protein and vitamins and they caught diseases from 
domesticated animals: measles from cattle, flu from ducks, plague from 
rats and worms from using their own excrement as fertiliser.


They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time. 
Hunter-gatherers' dependence on sharing each other's hunting 

Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Ratbag Media via Marxism]

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Things may not be as they seem...
Bruce Pascoe's wonderful book, "Dark Emu --Aboriginal Australia and
the Birth of Agriculture" is turning the hunter/gatherer assumption on
its head.
https://is.gd/lf4xh8
..which further research  confirms.
I think  the 'birth of agriculture' as a lifestyle, cannot be reduced
down to a generic judgement as it is an embrace ruled by history.
The 'mistake' made isn't the agriculture but the way the food was
grown. And that's as true today as it was thousands of years ago.
The Polynesian/Micronesian sweet potato/yam culture and  the
traditional “Milpa” system of the Americas were ecologically kosher
and sustainable.
The complication of the shift is the continuing problem posed by  the
dependency and fertility loss inherent in monocultures and the cutting
down of trees for fire and cooking.
Soil disturbance through the invention and use of the plough has to be
seen as a key mistake.
That, and maybe the embrace of grains as the core carbohydrate source.
Today that is still a major environmental headache -- these grains.
Annuals that they are.
That agriculture is marked down because it is vulnerable to drought,
weather vagaries and overpopulation is addressed by various means in
the history of agriculture. And Mike Davis points out in  'Late
Victorian Holocausts' -- you cannot separate the 21st century
hindsight view of agriculture from  the onslaught of capitalism and
imperialism.
Even in Marx's take on metabolic rift, a driving dynamic was the
separation of town and country that began the process of closing off
cyclical renewal.


dave riley

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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/19/19 9:55 PM, DW via Marxism wrote:

How does one even to such nonsense? Hunter gatherers "in which all people's
material wants were easily satisfied"what sort of fantasy is this?
Gawwwddd

David Walters


Marshal Sahlins's "Stone Age Economics" is online here:

https://libcom.org/files/Sahlins%20-%20Stone%20Age%20Economics.pdf

I particularly recommend chapter one: "The Original Affluent Society".
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[DW via Marxism]

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*The Original Affluent Society*

* by Marshall Sahlins*

* Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other
group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original
affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the
people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are
affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man
slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient
means is a tragedy of modern times. *

* full: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
*


How does one even to such nonsense? Hunter gatherers "in which all people's
material wants were easily satisfied"what sort of fantasy is this?
Gawwwddd

David Walters
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/18/19 6:53 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote:


Whatever the merit of a hunter-gatherer society, it is my understanding that 
they were in general closer to famine.  At least in the Far North this is a 
recollection of the people there.

And even with our present agriculture we are only somewhat better provided for. 
 I read once that there is a 72 day supply of food stored at any one time.

ken h


The Original Affluent Society

by Marshall Sahlins

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other 
group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original 
affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the 
people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters 
are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition 
of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his 
insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.


full: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Whatever the merit of a hunter-gatherer society, it is my understanding that 
they were in general closer to famine.  At least in the Far North this is a 
recollection of the people there.

And even with our present agriculture we are only somewhat better provided for. 
 I read once that there is a 72 day supply of food stored at any one time.

ken h
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[John Edmundson via Marxism]

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I think smarter agriculture, as in the Guardian article Louis posted,
reporting from Portugal, is a much more useful contribution than Diamond's
adulation of the past. If the idea is that we return to a human population
of a few hundred thousand then Diamond's idea might have merit.

John

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 2:15 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Arguments for hunting and gathering are ahistorical but are worth
> considering. Essentially, rice, potatoes, and wheat are of dubious value
> nutritionally even though they are the staples of class society.
>
>
> https://returntonow.net/2016/05/29/agriculture-worst-mistake-humans-ever-made/
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-- 
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose
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Re: [Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[DW via Marxism]

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What utter nonsense. What's clear to me is not only does this dilettante's
glorification of the misery of hunter-gather societies representing a total
falsification of the anthropological evidence he simply is ignorant of what
agriculture is and how it was practiced and what the *actual* problems were
with early agriculture (and practiced to this day). There ARE problems with
agriculture from the very beginning but Diamond misses the entire point.
Yuck.

David Walters
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[Marxism] Agriculture: The Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Arguments for hunting and gathering are ahistorical but are worth 
considering. Essentially, rice, potatoes, and wheat are of dubious value 
nutritionally even though they are the staples of class society.


https://returntonow.net/2016/05/29/agriculture-worst-mistake-humans-ever-made/
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