Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
What a load of revisionist / "noble savage myth" horseshit. See e.g. the punishments used by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for theft.
Every society has had theft. Every society has had thieves. Every society has had to deal with this.
What I will note is that native Americans didn't invent the prison-industrial complex.
There is no theft if you don't have a concept of ownership or value wealth.
See e.g. the punishments used by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for theft.
Well it doesn't look too bad:
Theft [in Haudenosaunee/Iroquois society] was comparatively rare, for land was the property of the community, surplus food was commonly shared with needier neighbors, and the long bark dwelling belonged to the maternal family, and the personal property like the tools and weapons of the men, the household goods and utensils of the women, were so easily replaced that they possessed little value. Practically the only objects open to theft were the strings of wampum beads that served both as ornaments and currency; but such was the value the community of spirit of the Iroquoians, so little did they esteem individual wealth, that a multitude of beads brought neither honor nor profit except so far as it gave the owner an opportunity to display his liberality by lavish contributions to the public coffers.
– The Indians of Canada, D. Jenness (1934), pg. 135-139, excerpted in The Iroquois: A Study in Cultural Evolution, by F. G. Speck (1945) pg. 32-33
[In Tsalagi/Cherokee society] Rather than coercion and punishment, social sanctions like ridicule, withdrawal, and ostracism, were used to bring wrongdoers and non-conformists back into harmony with the community.*
The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois also practiced slavery, including ritual torture and mutilation.
Native people are people -- they possess the same capacity for good and evil as anyone else. The only difference is they lacked the industrial capacity for cruelty other cultures had.
Especially when they began trading in the fur trade for guns, they created their own little fiefdoms for hunting, which meant keeping other tribes off their land.
I do want to be clear: I am not excusing what was done to the Native Americans or any other native people by colonizers -- it's inexcusable.
But regardless of good intentions: the "Noble Savage" myth is racism and it needs to die as it's an erasure of agency.
Definitely sounds better than what it is now
I hate to criticize your source on this one, but "The Indians of Canada, D. Jenness (1934)" is not going to be a reliable authority on native american culture. At that point in history we still had to deal with shit like Just One Drop policies, and although Jenness was a great deal less shitty than many others at the time, the cultures he had access to weren't representative of the cultures as they stood pre-genocides.
One can do a deep dive in how American Native Peoples dealt with societal issues. Yes, there absolutely were all the same problems we have today, from theft to lazy people to “fame” issues. Look up “Shame the Meat” for example. There were also punishments, some severe.
So the idea that tribal societies had it all figured out is absurd. They were people too, and had problems like anyone else.
It is the "noble savage myth" if it is a quote from a leader in the Lakota nation? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Fire_Lame_Deer
"Can people incorrectly lionize the past of their own cultures, a past they never even experienced and don't even have the excuse of nostalgia for?"
[quick glance at any number of reactionaries, revanchists, and nationalists]
Yes. Next question.
It's not credited, there's just a picture of an indigenous person that people aren't expected to recognize. The image is meant to imply that this is how all indigenous people lived by not specifying, using the words of one singular person from one singular nation to do so, which may not even be true to such an extent. The image is taking the quote and using it to perpetuate the myth.
Yes.
I came here to talk about the "Noble savage BS" myth. I wrote a college paper on it. Society always had a small fraction of psychopaths who didn't follow the laws of man. Society also knew to lock them up, or get rid of them.
Fun fact: the noble savage was originally counted by hateful racists, before it was repurposed by more "well meaning" racists.
How can there be theft if literally nobody owns anything?
personal property ≠ private property.
no one owned the land, but if someone took all my clothes that would be theft.
They still had private property. You try to take a man's only horse and you think he is going to be okay with it?
They had "personal property", property that is movable and possessable; chattel or personalty.
But they most assuredly did not have "private property,", ownership of immovable, "real property" by non-governmental entities. Who can own a lake or a sky? Obviously that belongs to all of us.
It's a minor phrasing difference but is foundational to out understanding of class inequality.
"Before electricity, we had no dishwashers, therefore we had no dirty dishes"
tbf, that post is noble savage bs.
that being said, the number one driver for crime is poverty, police don't fight poverty, they just protect the wealthy from the poor they are exploting.
Dirty Dishes existed before dishwashers. Dirty dishes didn’t exist before Dishes.
If your society doesn’t have a concept of ownership. Then theft (atleast between members) doesn’t exist in the same way.
If your society doesn’t have a concept of law. Then “criminality” doesn’t exist either.
I do really think that in small communities, there would be no problem abolishing the police. But the problem I see which I don't think I've seen a good argument for, is how it can work at scale. We generally live in much larger and denser communities than the native peoples lived, so it seems like the strategies they used to handle bad-actors won't work in the same way for us.
Here's something to think about:
Why do we live in much larger and denser communities now?
For the majority of human existence we've lived in rural communities. What drove the urbanisation of rural populations?
During covid many places saw the reverse, ruralisation of urban populations. In an anarchist utopia that has removed capitalism, do you think people would stick with large dense urban environments or, like during covid, begin to ruralise again?
If you're unsure of what your opinion is on these questions. Somewhere to start could be looking at the Scottish Highland clearances, the Industrial Revolution in the UK, and the textile industry of the British Empire. All are major factors as to why Scotland urbanised. Most countries urbanised for similar reasons, but these examples are very well documented and very overt so make it more clear than many other places do.
We can also just look at the reasons people today still live in densely populated cities, despite big drawbacks such as the cost of housing. Proximity to jobs, universities, recreation options, grocery stores, and more. It makes perfect sense that during COVID when much of these benefits were essentially eliminated due to lockdowns, that the negatives began to outweigh the positives for many people, and so they moved away.
I don't know exactly what your idea of an anarchist utopia looks like, but if it still involves things like universities, a wide variety of available jobs, various recreational activities, etc. then I don't see why the desire for people to live in cities would change?
Also, not really related to my main point, but still: Yes throughout history we generally lived in rural communities, but this was not due to desire but necessity. For most of history small areas simply could not sustain large numbers of people, not too mention the other problems like housing and disease. But once we worked out how to sustain ourselves, we started living in larger and larger groups. It just so happens that some of these problems were solved under capitalism.
I feel that this is relevant to the discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Behavioral sink is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior that can result from overpopulation.
Many [female rats] were unable to carry the pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep.
Having reached a level of high population density, the mice began exhibiting a variety of abnormal, often destructive, behaviors including refusal to engage in courtship, and females abandoning their young. By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction. Though physically able to reproduce, the mice had lost the social skills required to mate.
"Calhoun's work was not simply about density in a physical sense, as number of individuals-per-square-unit-area, but was about degrees of social interaction."
Obviously rodent studies are only so applicable to humans, but I see myself and worrying modern societal tends in some of their behavior and the ways they suffer.
I think that when we interact with too many strangers every day that we're unable to make meaningful connections with any of them, leading to stress and illness. If we had few enough encounters that we could come to recognize most of them, it would build trust and a sense of community.
Don't tell him where horses came from.
Is it when a mummy horse and daddy horse love each other very much?
North america.
I was under the impression that all horses are descendants from mongolia and that the ones in north America are descended from the horses brought over by the colonizers
Ya was being a bit pedantic. Horses and camels originated in NA millions of years ago but died off several thousands years ago. Modern ones were reintroduced.
Where is this quote originally from? There's no attribution
Lame Deer, J. F., & Erdoes, R. (1972). Lame Deer, seeker of visions: The life of a Sioux medicine man. Simon & Schuster.
With citations and photos? You da mvp. Thanks, amigo.
Wait a minute, you trying to tell me that anarchy was better??
A collective society for the benefit of all instaed of a few
Sure they had slaves and the typical patriarchal society where women were treated like property, but at least you never had to worry about leaving your tipi unlocked, those were the good old days.
Umm some indigenous peoples were matriarch societies, and many were matrilineal land ownership.
@Deceptichum So ein Bullshit!
Native Americans waren Menschen wie alle andern auch, haben gemordet, vergewaltigt und sich für irgendwelche Status-Symbole oder Stammeszugehörigkeiten gegenseitig abgemetzelt. Der Kapitalismus hat das nicht besser gemacht aber die waren genauso wenig heilige wie jede andere Menschen Gruppe irgendwo anders auf der Welt!
Die haben wie die meisten anderen Menschen auch in autoritären, patriarchalischen Strukturen der Gewalt gelebt!
Translated to English:
@Deceptichum What a load of rubbish! Native Americans were people like everyone else, they murdered, raped and slaughtered each other for status symbols or tribal affiliations. Capitalism didn't make things any better, but they were just as unholy as any other group of people anywhere else in the world!
Like most other people, they lived in authoritarian, patriarchal structures of violence!
Don’t shit on John Fire Lame Deer just because he challenges your understanding of how society can function.
No one is claiming they were perfect and lived in complete harmony with each other 100% of the time in a utopia. That’s a strawman you’re creating to resist listening to what is being said.
"We had no criminals, we had no thieves, we only wanted things to give them away" is a very curious thing to assert as non-utopian; equally curious to assert it as how Sioux society was, considering they were famously warlike against fellow indigenous cultures. I suppose they wanted to give away violence?
White colonialism made the lives of indigenous people worse. But it didn't do it because it 'invented crime', or 'invented greed'.
It’s easy to have a utopia when you live in a village where everybody knows each other. You don’t have to look to indigenous peoples for that. There are plenty of villages around the world where communities still thrive.
How do you achieve that in cities of a million people or countries of a hundred million? No one has figured that out yet because all the mechanisms we’re born with for building trusting, reciprocal relationships do not scale much more than a couple hundred people at most.
I wish I could live this way
So did they
Sounds way better.