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Dawn of Everything
From Irish Marxist Review, Vol. 11 No. 33, June 2022, pp. 71–73.
Copyright © Irish Marxist Review.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Most of us have a linear notion of the history of social development. First, many believe, were the hunter-gathers, people who lived precariously in small tribes and ate whatever they could find or kill. At some point our ancestors switched to agriculture and then, much later, modern industrial society emerged. The timeline for these changes is inevitably vague; there is often, too, the implicit (or explicit) suggestion that these transformations are on the whole beneficial, and that we, modern humans, are the lucky benefactors of this long process of gradual improvement. It is this teleological and apparently intuitive narrative which The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), a wide-ranging, popular synthesis of research from archaeology and anthropology, sets out to dismantle. ‘Primitive’ cultures are, for Graeber and Wengrow, much more diverse, complex and variegated than the sweeping caricatures we generally hold of them. This book touches on a number of areas of immediate relevance to the radical left, most notably private property, the nature of the state, inequality, and the potential for, as well as (pre-)historical occasions of, fundamental social reorganisation.
None of this should be any surprise to those familiar with the more famous of the book’s co-authors, David Graeber, who died in 2020, shortly after the work was finished. A key figure in the Occupy movement, Graeber was a long-time anarchist activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (better known as the ‘Wobblies’). He is also widely reputed to have coined the slogan, ‘We are the 99%’. From its inception, then, The Dawn of Everything was never going to be the panegyric to modern capitalism and liberal democracy which has become the standard fare of broad stroke histories of humanity, best exemplified in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity (2011). Unlike Harari and other writers in this genre, Graeber and Wengrow are leading experts in their respective fields of anthropology and archaeology. As a result, their work feels both remarkably original and refreshingly well-informed, and, for this reason alone, it no doubt merits serious attention from anyone interested in the questions it poses.
What may come as a surprise to those on the left, especially its more reformist tendencies, is Graeber and Wengrow’s problematisation of the concept of inequality, a term the authors see primarily as a tool for those ‘who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.’ [1] Instead of sorting countries or communities into those which are ‘egalitarian’ and others which are ‘inegalitarian’, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the presence or otherwise of basic freedoms offers a more productive framework for thinking about differences between societies than limited empirical measurements like the Gini coefficient. The authors identify three key liberties, none of which they see as existing for the majority in modern capitalism or in preceding feudalism:
They do, however, document their existence in a range of different forms of social organisation throughout history. Provocatively, they argue that it was colonial encounters with such emancipated societies in North America which provided the intellectual impetus which helped generate the Enlightenment and, ultimately, the French Revolution. European settlers were shocked to come into contact with radically free and highly democratic cultures in which noone had the ability to coerce anyone else to do anything they did not wish to do. This was not the case for all indigenous societies; many were predicated on brutal systems of slaveholding, exploitation and warmongering, as in Europe. Nor did this mean that these free societies were entirely equal; differences in status and individual rank did exist, but one’s position on the social pecking order did not make it possible to economically abuse those below. The key benefit of thinking in terms of freedom rather than equality is that it eliminates the ambiguity inherent to the idea of ‘equalitarianism’. Instead of comparing abstract figures on income and mortality which tell us little about what living is actually like, Graeber and Wengrow’s turn to liberty recentres, in Marx’s terms, man’s ability to make his ‘life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness’ [3] as the fundamental measure of emancipation; a view which ought to be discomforting for the more economistic and authoritarian of his self-proclaimed disciples. Such a reorientation also offers a momentous challenge to liberal progressives who claim – less convincingly each day – that we have reached the acme of human social development and that there is no need for any kind of radical change which could upset this delicate balance. It also equips genuine leftists with the rhetorical tools necessary to take on right wing arguments that socialism would impinge on freedom, or that hierarchical domination is the only right and natural form of social organisation.
Likewise, Graeber and Wengrow’s perspectives on private property and the state are likely to prove perplexing for much of the left and right alike. While one review has already claimed that Graeber and Wengrow’s principal enemy is the state [4], it would be much more accurate to say that the authors of The Dawn of Everything are highly sceptical of the usefulness of the state as an analytical concept, arguing that, in most cases, it is a misleading modern projection which does little to help us understand how ancient and indigenous social organisation actually functioned. While such a view may at first appear incompatible with a Marxist analysis which insists on the state as an essential apparatus of class domination, it can in fact liberate this position, allowing for the state to be conceived not merely in narrow terms of ‘government’, ‘civil service’, ‘law’ etc. but rather all the entire diffuse mechanisms of class war, the ‘private’ and ‘public’ elements of which are in practice impossible to disentangle. Graeber and Wengrow’s discussion of private property will also be strange territory for many accustomed to conventional Marxian lines of thought, arguing that, rather than emerging due to changes in the mode of production, private property has at its root a disastrous overspill of the sacred: ‘the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers – not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it’s sacred to a specific, living human individual.’ [5]
Their emphasis on the capacity for self-conscious decisions around production in ‘primitive’ societies is the key difference between Graeber and Wengrow’s analysis of the wide span of human history and that of Marx, who thought the ‘tribal’ mode of ownership necessarily limited these societies to hunting and fishing. [6] For example, rather than judging the advent of agriculture to have brought about a corresponding new form of social organisation, Graeber and Wengrow argue for the widespread existence in free societies of ‘play farming’ which did not create the division of labour Marx and Engels believed it ought to have. [7] As such, a serious defence of traditional Marxist views on ‘primitive’ societies against The Dawn of Everything and the research it draws upon is a daunting task, if not one which is entirely insurmountable. That Graeber and Wengrow are a better source is without question, drawing as they are on a much richer bank of experience and expertise than Marx ever could, confined as he was to the reading rooms of the British Library and hindered by the limitations of a nineteenth century education. It is therefore vital for socialists to make sure we are not repeating centuries old, unverified banalities about ‘primitive societies’, but that we are always working towards integrating new arguments and research into our broader theoretical perspectives.
Critical to The Dawn of Everything is a rejection of any totalising vision of history. Intrinsic to this is a disavowal of any notion of ‘origins’. As societies have taken so many disparate and disconnected forms, there cannot be, in any meaningful sense, any one single beginning to any of the human social phenomena discussed above. How (or whether) to integrate this viewpoint into traditional historical materialism is an open and difficult task. The prospect of its completion purging Marxism of any trace of Edenism and teleology is a welcome one.
In terms of practical activism, the greatest deficiency of the book is its lack of a feasible political programme. While acknowledging that societies can become ‘stuck’ in inequitable forms of social organisation, Graeber and Wengrow do nothing to outline for us how we might make modern capitalism come ‘unstuck’. They do, however, allude to such (not always peaceable) changes in past societies, such as Taosi in modern day China, which they see as plausibly the earliest known site of an urban social revolution. While it is perhaps too much to expect an explicit endorsement of the need for revolution in a work of mainstream non-fiction written by two professional academics, some sense of what pragmatic action the authors would advise based on the information and arguments presented would have been a natural conclusion to a book like this. What good, after all, is a diagnosis without a prescription?
Yet what The Dawn of Everything offers us more than anything else is hope. The world, Graeber and Wengrow insist, can be changed: capitalism is not the logical end point of history, nor is liberty a mere utopian dream. This book, as well as being genuinely encyclopaedic in its breadth of knowledge, is a bulwark of optimism. In times like these, that is what is truly essential.
1. Graeber, David and Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Allen Lane, Great Britain, 2021. p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 503.
3. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker, W.W. Norton and Co., New York 1978. 2nd Ed. p. 76.
4. Lindisfarne, Nancy and Neale, Jonathon. All Things Being Equal. https://annebonnypirate.org/2021/12/16/all-things-being-equal/. Published: 26/12/2021, accessed: 15/03/2022.
5. The Dawn of Everything, p. 159.
6. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The German Ideology in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 151.
7. Ibid.
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