Eso’s Chronicles 321 / 8
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

WHAT IS ‘COMMUNISM’? (4)

Under the subtitle of ‘Early communism’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism , we read: “Karl Marx saw primitive communism as the original, hunter-gatherer state of humankind from which it arose. For Marx, only after humanity was capable of producing surplus, did private property develop….”

I could, loosely speaking, agree with the sentences, but with some serious qualifications and objections. For me:

1. Communism is the given state of any and all species in nature’; I assume that the hominid species emerged from life in the wood;

2. Private property began as theft; a good example being the Vikings, who emerged from animal herders, who not knowing much about geography, got stuck on the Scandinavian peninsula, and because when winter came, they could not find their way back to the Black and Caspian seas region, began to slaughter their herds (for warm clothing and tents). Earlier on, they had used the animals (reindeer) largely as milking cows. The act of butchery (as opposed to sacrifice; an act of giving of what was dear to them to the Gods) inured the herders against taking life and eating flesh. Such inuring served the Vikings well when they finally discovered a way to cross the Baltic Sea and got back south to whence they had come. Along their way back home they survived by marauding http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/marauder , i.e. thievery, an activity alien to them in the past.;

3. A post-forest era communist is a ‘human rights activist’ as an unacknowledged anarchist in an urban environment who is not familiar with and does not recognize any other environment than the urban one, which is a direct outgrowth of Viking (and their like) maraudery. Like the early Greeks—said to have invented ‘democracy’ (a nostalgic and idyllic term for communism in the wood)—the ‘democrat’ is an idealist without quite knowing whence his-her idealism derives;

4. The early ‘surplus’ that Marx speaks of was not a result of deliberately produced ‘surplus’, but was the marauders booty. Aggressive thievery is ultimately costly, not only to the victims of robbery, but also to the robbers, because the early travel routes were a constant and well known, that is to say, these were river routes, which is why it was discovered, likely early on, that robbery could be replaced by an annual fur ‘tax’, which the Vikings would collect on their way to the holy cities that lay to the south. Alexandria, Egypt, may have been one such city, but was eventually transferred across the Mediterranean to Byzantium.

5. Political and economic writers give short shrift to the custom of early communists of gift giving http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Mauss . According to Marcel Mauss gifts are not ‘free’, but invite reciprocity, whereby a kind of equality if maintained between the gift givers and receivers. In short, economic equality is an a priori presumption of the hominids of the wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Samoa .

6. Production of ‘surplus’ is an alien activity to the hominids of the wood. The contrary tradition in capitalist society indicates a society living in a stressful mode. The artificial or alienated nature of modern government and society are reflected in two modes of natural resistance:

a) organized or disorganized revolts and rebellions against capitalist and government exploitation;

b) unconscious relief seeking—from the stress of producing a never ending demand for a commodity ‘surplus’ and yasak or ‘tax’—by turning to alcohol, marihuana, various drugs, and transcendental meditation.

7. Contrary to the presumption of contemporary political ‘scientists’, the urban environment did not originate among hominids because it is an archetype that comes with its own momentum. The original city was not an agglomeration of huts, but a temple with a resident shaman-healer. The temple was, over a period of time, embellished from the gifts left by the healed in return for the gift of being healed. Because of such accumulations of ‘surplus’ (very likely silver and gold—because both shine), the temples became attractions to marauders, who replaced the shaman with the ‘Sturmbandfuerer’ of the oarsmen of their boat.

8. Though Hardt and Negri at one point insinuate that the struggle of the proletariat (no longer simply the ‘industrial working class’) against the ‘good’ or ‘beneficial’ Empire continues, they also acknowledge that “…in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable.”  (Italics in original, p54.) While they attribute the incommunicability to the increasingly sophisticated (‘charm them into passivity’) management tactics of the Empire, and suggest that the ‘struggle’ against the Empire will eventually discover a ‘real alternative’, they appear unfazed by the fact that the Empire presumes itself to be a Monopoly (a fascist organization) for itself, for which reason it cares little for the hominid swarms in the city deserts, but is more concerned about fighting and winning wars against their competitors, re: U.S. & NATO vs Russia & China.

The war of Empires is brewing in the area that used to be the destination of the Viking marauders, and it does not at all concern the multitudes of hominids, who—for all their passivity—are alleged to have a somatic apparatus within them to eventually seize control of the urban desert and continue to desertify the planet for the sake of their ‘human rights’ orgasms for ever more.

9. I fail to see why the hominids (the outsiders of the Empire, whose operators call themselves ‘human beings’) should not welcome, both, the end of the Empires and the ‘proletariat’, in return for being able to gift our planet with apple trees a thousand years old—in the middle of the wood anywhere on planet Earth.