Chris Knight in his review of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything says the book is not about the ‘dawn’ of humanity but its ‘tea time’ around 30,000 years ago. It misses most of humanity’s first 200,000 years of hunting and gathering in Africa before the migration to Eurasia. Oh how boring. There is a reason for that. It erases the ‘first revolution’ won by mothers who used their sex strike to negotiate terms with men, socializing human reproduction to create egalitarian communes surviving many millennia. It projects private property and free market entrepreneurism back in history and cherry picks case studies to reinforce the bourgeois ideology that human nature is fixed for all time in the image of the possessive individual male.
Following Marx, Engels and Luxemburg, Marxists claim that women were the first revolutionaries who managed to create and defend the communal order on the basis of matrilineal kinship over many thousands of years. The overthrow of ‘mother right’ by the patriarchy established the first ‘class’ society. As we fight to end all class society in a future communist society, women’s resistance to the rise of class society in defense of the commune for millennia, offers both inspiration and important lessons for our fight for socialism and the commune today.
Chris Knight comments on Rosa Luxemburg:
“In her last book, Einfuhrung in die Nationalökonomie, she argued that “primitive communism, with its corresponding democracy and social equality [was] … the cradle of social development”. She went on to claim that “the whole of modern civilisation, with its private property, its class domination, its male domination, its compulsory state and compulsory marriage [is] merely a brief passing phase, which, because they first formed from the dissolution of primitive communist society, in future will become higher social forms … A communist and democratic society, even if in different and more primitive forms, embraced the whole long past of cultural history prior to present-day civilisation. In this way, the noble tradition of the ancient past, thus holds out a hand to the revolutionary aspirations of the future, the circle of knowledge closes harmoniously, and the present world of class domination and exploitation … becomes merely a minuscule transient stage in the great cultural advance of humanity.”
Chris Knight’s theory of ‘blood relations’ gives more substance to the contested social relations of Marx, Engels and Luxemburg’s concept of “primitive communism”. He argues that approximately 40,000 years ago women began a revolution in hunter-gatherer clans by organizing a sisterhood to protect their children from men. They synchronized their menstrual cycle with the full moon and went on a sex strike to compel their husbands to go hunting to provide for the children. This social relation allowed women to resist for many thousands of years the rise of the patriarchy. And, I would argue, it is that undying resistance that survives today in the emerging struggle against the Patriarchy especially in the form of trans-ideology which claims that men can become women.
This is an explanation for the recent emergence of trans-ideology today intensifying the backlash against second wave feminism just as capitalism slides into terminal crisis. The crisis this time is more extreme as Capital is destroying nature as the condition for its existence. Facing death Capital pulls out every dirty trick in the book to divide and rule the proletariat. This must include the neutralization of women as part of nature’s fightback against capital over control of children. It is here that we can see the postmodern, idealist and voluntarist reprise of the overthrow of ancient ‘mother right’ behind the trans claims to be ‘menstruators’ and ‘uterus bearers’. Just as the original patriarchs sought to neutralize women’s power in reproducing blood relations by staging men’s menstrual rituals, trans-activists today claim that women do not have the exclusive right to motherhood. (Blood Relations p36-37)
Since transwomen claim to be ‘women’ they insist the term ‘uterus bearers’ must include men. So the trans-cult is not just woke, or the commodification of sex by a profit-driven new industry, it is the patriarchy attempting to erase the solidarity of the sisterhood grounded in sexual reproduction, and to separate ‘sisters’ from ‘brothers’, to divide the proletariat with charges of transphobia and fascism, taking us all down the road to extinction.
The original sisterhood solidarity worked for millennia, supported by mother’s brothers and the maternal clan. It was disrupted by men to form the original class society, the patriarchy, which survives today in the continued exploitation and oppression of women as unpaid or underpaid reproducers and producers. We need the return of sisterhood solidarity as an integral part of the working-class struggle for permanent revolution.
The model of ‘mothers’ brothers’ role in the matrilineal clan relations (see Blood Relations p 26-29) can inspire the solidarity of men with women’s reproductive and productive rights. That means standing up for women as an historic sex class defending nature from capitalist destruction. It means uniting the working class to defend women’s spaces from men who want to invade them. We don’t dispute the right of trans people to identify as men or women. It is their insistence that gender identity replaces sex that attacks the legacy of the first social revolution today as part of the permanent revolution for the new commune.
https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/
https://libcom.org/history/did-communism-make-us-human-anthropology-david-graeber-chris-knight
Dave Brownz is TDBs Guest Marxist, because every left wing blog should have a guest Marxist.
I read Graebler on Debt but not this. A trend emerges in important work. Marx, Keynes, Smith et al are heterodox, they translate a vision that renders the orthodox redundant. If they were orthodox they would have disappeared into that morass of shills and parrots.
Marx solved the problem Smith had of explaining where profits came from: labour power created more value than its own value.
Keynes tried to sidestep the LTRPF only to get bogged down in stagflation.
Chris Knight took his cue from Marx on the Commune in Grundrisse.
Marx was the all-time champion disruptor of orthodoxy.
Stalin was 100% right about Rosa. He correctly identified her as a supporter of the Mensheviks and an enemy of real communism.
Stalin was 100% unreconstructed Menshevik. In 1924, Lenin on his deathbed called for Stalin’s replacement as General Secretary by Trotsky. Stalin’s wife who was nursing Lenin told Stalin about Lenin’s plan and not long after Lenin was dead.
Luxemburg founded the Spartacist Party in Germany when the Social Democratic Party formed a government with the ruling class in November 1918. She paid the price for being a revolutionary with her brutal assassination, along with Liebknecht, by fascists in January 1919.
Stalin died peacefully in his bed having opposed the Bolshevik insurrection in 1917; sabotaged the Red Army incursion into Poland against the counter-revolutionaries during the civil war in 1920, and then the German Revolution in 1923; executed most of the old Bolsheviks including Trotsky, and made alliances with the fascist Hitler and fascist sympathizer Winston Churchill to suppress workers’ revolution during and after WW2.
stalin died on the floor in a puddle of his own piss…strokes will do that for you.
GUEST BLOG: Dave Brownz DAWN OF HUMANITY
By The Daily Blog -September 17, 2022
We live in a funny old world.
For a minute there I thought that this post might be about a personal dawning of humanity by Dave. Instead of the inhumanity of his stated support for Russian Federation imperialist savagery. But no. I see no sign of that level of accountability.
“Chris Knight’s theory of ‘blood relations’ gives more substance to the contested social relations of Marx, Engels and Luxemburg’s concept of “primitive communism”. He argues that approximately 40,000 years ago women began a revolution in hunter-gatherer clans by organizing a sisterhood to protect their children from men. They synchronized their menstrual cycle with the full moon and went on a sex strike to compel their husbands to go hunting to provide for the children. This social relation allowed women to resist for many thousands of years the rise of the patriarchy.”
These assertions read like fundamentalist religious ideology. I would like to see solid archaeological and anthropological evidence to support them.
“And, I would argue, it is that undying resistance that survives today in the emerging struggle against the Patriarchy especially in the form of trans-ideology which claims that men can become women.” Etc.
Desperate, baseless transphobia seems to occupy the mind of the author during much of the article.
IMO Dave Brownz is as misinformed & confused as conspiracy theory-led antivaxxers & their anti-democratic far-right siblings.
Read ‘Blood Relations’ if you want evidence in support of the ‘sex strike’.
No religious bullshit. In fact it exposes the fallacy of bourgeois anthropology projecting its patriarchal ideology back to the hunter gatherers.
The article makes these points because that is the point of the article. The links in the articles make this clear.
No I am not transphobic. I am strongly against men erasing women today just as they did first time round 10,000 years ago.
and the basis of chris knights theory is wishful thinking…driven by ideological belief not any form of historiography and is untroubled by the need for any evidence.
When person A manipulates person B into a position of beholding then exploit that beholding you get a rupture in the astral plain from which bile and bitterness pours down upon a mother fucker.
So then up from that B motherfucker rises resentment, hatred, fear and envy and those elements poison the great realms which is then further manipulated by those who made the first move. Lets never forget; first movers were always the first to move.
The only way to defeat ‘First Movers’ is to move first for a fucking change and to do that we must stop playing the game by their rules.
Banking and commerce are a gigantic swindle. They were first too in that bankers figured out how to be first. Firstly, create a need the B people never saw coming. Repeat as necessary.
First. They get us into debt. Second. They exploit that debt to make us do their bidding, not ours.
Thirdly. Give us war, poverty, hardship, misery, two days off a week to try and be who we really are, then old age then the grave.
And then, when we die, there they are. Waiting on us to collect. Another day, another dawn.
Fuck that.
Re “The Dawn of Everything”
“The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history has “progressed” by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). The book’s alleged major “fundamental” insight is “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (the first part of that statement is hardly a great insight because a perceptive child can recognize that) YET fails to answer why we do NOT make it differently than it is now if we, supposedly can make it “EASILY” different, why we’ve been “stuck” in this destructive system for a very long time. THAT is really where “the ultimate, hidden truth” is buried and the answer is… it is because of the enduring hegemony of “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding the nature of humans)
A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title) — see last cited source above. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
“The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.
“The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown
all civilisation stems from a simple rule most rightards don’t understand..
DON’T SHIT IN THE CAVE
after that it’s just progression
Chris Knight talks about:
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 21 April 2015
https://vimeo.com/126073173