September 05, 2005

"A duty of love" While he would likely have preferred another date, today seems nevertheless an appropriate day to honor the socialist, union organizer, five time presidential candidate, and hero of at least one famous author: Eugene Victor Debs. (w)

To say the socialist movement of the early 20th century was successful might be a bit of an overstatement, but I doubt many would say it was pointless. The real question is: is it over? Has organized labor had its heyday? With americans averaging over 50-hour work weeks and our economy shifting more and more to flexible production and labor, maybe it's time to rethink the problem. (see also (halfway down))

posted by stripe 18 years ago
  • Oh and I should probably throw this in there for good measure.
  • Nice post, stripe! Lots to look though here.
  • Thanks, stripe. Regarding the last link, I'm trying to conceptualize what human society would be like now if we'd stayed hunter-gatherers. We'd apparently be healthier, but less densly populated. But, the few hunter-gatherers who've survived appear to be living pretty much as h-gs did millenia ago, if left on their own. Was the ability to progress (and, I think we have, though you may have other opinions) based on greater population density? Doesn't the ability to to discuss with a larger community mean that ideas are perpetuated, and the it's easier for people to look for answers? I wonder how long it would have taken to create the internets if we were still h-gs. And, the Paco Xander Nathan link was great.
  • How do you define progress? Certainly we have amassed a lot of information and theory about how things work, and I would say that we have probably gotten more intelligent in terms of individuals being able to deal more intelligently with their world or adapt to it. We as a society have arguably gotten better at altering our environment for our own needs. (but then again we have thousands of nuclear warheads sitting around too) In other words, I'm not sure any of this would look like progress to a hunter-gatherer. I mean, we can do cool magic and stuff but it's not like there has to be some cosmic chart that says Having The Internet Is Better Than Picking Blueberries.
  • I'm not sure any of this would look like progress to a hunter-gatherer...it's not like there has to be some cosmic chart that says Having The Internet Is Better Than Picking Blueberries. Well, okay, but so what? Fact is, we aren't hunter-gatherers and probably don't want to go back to that. I don't. We see our "cool magic and stuff" as progress -- or at least I do and probably most everyone else does -- so, for all practical purposes, it is progress. There needn't be any "cosmic chart," just the commonsense conception most people share and agree upon. I mean, don't you think humans are fundamentally better off now?
  • Smo, I could argue both ways, depending on suppositions about what's the best place for humans. I think it's exploring and hypothesisng and doing scientific research, but, maybe, that's because it's what I know. Could I go back to h-g life? I don't really know - I couldn't if the current h-gs are the only possible outcome, but, if their shorter work day meant that we could sit around the camp fire and dream up all sorts of explorations into the nature of things, and then carry them out... well, then what? What makes the difference? Certainly, less population density could be a real advantage, especially for the environment,but what is the spur that goads us to progress?
  • Thanks for posting this Stripe, I only had a vague idea about who Debs was...
  • Re: the hunter-gatherer, that kinda life is overromanticized. We take a lot for granted in our internetted world and one of them is food on the table. The other is humongous lifespans (by historical standards). I'd say those are both objective standards of progress. We may be all angsty in the 21st century but the hunter-gatherer had it nasty, brutish and short.
  • = a lot of things for granted *argh*
  • food on the table? I'll grant you the life expectancy though I'm not sure we (and by "we" I mean myself as well as modern social science collectively) really have a good enough grasp on sociology or psychology or anthropology to definitively say Hobbes is right or wrong. Personally, I doubt there is a 'standard' or 'natural' way for humans to live, at least one that has any kind of broad applicability between people.
  • Clearly there are lots of people who are undernourished in the world. But in hunter-gatherer societies, the proportion of starving and undernourished is even higher. I would dispute that we don't know enough about the living conditions of hunter-gatherer societies. Studies of Kalahari bushmen, !Kung people, Inuit are pretty clear. The murder rate among the !Kung is many times higher on a per capita basis than that of the worst American inner city. Average life expectancy is 30 years. Consider the mathematics of it: birth rates are high (no contraception), life expectancy is low and population growth is low. This means you got a lot of people dying through disease (=nasty), starvation, , one-on-one violence (=brutish), and infant mortality (=short). Most of us, me especially, wouldn't last a month in a h-g society. (e.g. see Katrina)
  • Incidentally, those undernourished people in India are probably living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
  • Did you read the whole Diamond article? While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. RE disease, which Diamond addresses in Guns Germs and Steel: Most deadly diseases did not come about until the domestication of animals. E.g. they are only able successfully proliferate in larger populations. Also I'm pretty sure that there are not 250,000 hunter-gatherers in india.
  • I missed the Diamond article completely, so thanks for pointing that out stripe, because it is a good read. One interesting thing is he claims the height of male European hunter-gatherers was quite close to modern human height. Diamond goes on to make the case that early agricultural societies were worse off in lifestyle (more disease, more inequality) but better at supporting larger numbers of humans. The point about disease sounds right. Maybe h-gs were more healthy than those early agric. societies. Neat. But getting back to our original discussion which was about comparing h-g society to *modern* society, our Western post-industrial society still wins. (And let's add Diamond's height metric as yet one more signpost of success). Re: hunter-gathering in India. What i meant was the urban slum dwellers, those who are the undernourished, are hunters and gatherers in a descriptive sense but you can argue rightly that it's not fair to compare them to neolithic h-g's. I concede the point. But I would like to make another counterargument. The situation in India (and it has been improving in recent years) does not negate the fact that Western civilization has demonstrated societal success. (Just thought of something weird: aren't Pygmies hunter-gatherers? Doesn't that put a dent in Diamond's "h-gs are taller" thesis?)
  • CHARTER MEMBERS EUGENE V. DEBS FOUNDATION MARCH 17, 1962 H. A. Abramson Donald Allen V. Dewey Annakin Roger Baldwin Morris Blumberg... ...John Dos Passos Otto Pragan Albert Schweizter Clifford Shanks Mulford Sibley Upton Sinclair Edward Spann Karl Stark Kate Steichmann Earl Stephanson Irving Stone Norman Thomas Edward Whalen Thanks, Stripe, for postinng this. I have often thought about posting about the Debs society but didn't want to get sand-mail about self-linking. I cannot tell you how proud I am that my great-aunt Kate, who taught me the importance of working for the common good and how to try to tell what that all means, is nestled comfortably between John Dos Passos, Albert Schweitzer, and I. F. Stone as a founding member of Debs society. My great-uncle Heinrich was secretary-treasurer and later president of the Deutsche-American National Turn-Verein in Indianapolis during Debs struggles, and Kate talked about times that the Debs and the Steichmanns met. Kate and Heinrich and my grandfather were all Wobblies. Must be why I still have trouble making right turns...
  • CHARTER MEMBERS EUGENE V. DEBS FOUNDATION MARCH 17, 1962 H. A. Abramson Donald Allen V. Dewey Annakin Roger Baldwin Morris Blumberg... ...John Dos Passos Otto Pragan Albert Schweizter Clifford Shanks Mulford Sibley Upton Sinclair Edward Spann Karl Stark Kate Steichmann Earl Stephanson Irving Stone Norman Thomas Edward Whalen Thanks, Stripe, for posting this. I have often thought about posting about the Debs society but didn't want to get sand-mail about self-linking. I cannot tell you how proud I am that my great-aunt Kate, who taught me the importance of working for the common good and how to try to tell what that all means, is nestled comfortably between John Dos Passos, Albert Schweitzer, and I. F. Stone as a founding member of Debs society. My great-uncle Heinrich was secretary-treasurer and later president of the Deutsche-American National Turn-Verein in Indianapolis during Debs struggles, and Kate talked about times that the Debs and the Steichmanns met. Kate and Heinrich and my grandfather were all Wobblies. Must be why I still have trouble making right turns...
  • ack! where's the "I goofed" button?
  • StoryBored: I think Pygmy hight is based on genetics, not nutrition. Yes there are objective measurements of societies that can be assigned values of "progress", but I think these values might tend to have less correllation with other indicators than we like to believe. And I also think we're pretty biased. deconstructo: That is really great! I recently wrote my undergrad thesis on some german socialists. It's great history but there's something imminently more exciting about somebody from my home state. Family connections even more so.