Hi Mollydukes,

Thanks for the serve. My wife was Aboriginal, we lived and worked at a couple of communities, hers and another one here in SA. I've worked in Aboriginal organisations, mainly with Aboriginal university students. Maria and I worked on the first flags forty years ago and sent many of them around the country, indeed around the world. Maria used to give one to visiting artists such as Buffy sainte-Marie and Roberta Flack, BB King and The Drifters. We both taught Ab Studies from the early eighties. And as far as I can tell, I'm still the only fool who is keeping up with Indigenous tertiary education stats.

Yes you're right, traditional Aboriginal society wasn't in any way communist, and really it wasn't all that reciprocal, more like some had obligations to other older relations, and nobody had any obligations to anybody who wasn't a relation, and usually a close relation at that.

As for warfare, amongst the Ngarrindjeri for example, a loose grouping of eight or nine dialect groups, and more than a hundred clans, hostility between some dialect groups, even between related clans, was the norm. And it was often fatal: the missionary George Taplin reported the gathering of many warriors from one dialect group, in alliance with another, to get stuck into another dialect group, and consequently had to patch up one guy with a spear through his eye, another with a spear through his knee. His main informant proudly showed him the scars of multiple near-fatal wounds. Taplin's Journals, 600 pages, are available from me if you want to read them: rmg1859@yahoo.com.au

In his book 'Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State', Engels somewhat overstated the communal nature of traditional society: it was more hierarchical, with obligations owed up the hierarchy in exchange for 'knowledge' passed down by the elders. 'Knowledge' was jealously-guarded private property - the modern knowledge of freely available knowledge would be anathema in such an inegalitarian society.

Mollydukes,

Sorry, that should have read: 'the modern situation of freely available knowledge would be anathema in such an inegalitarian society.'

With respect, you do exemplify the choices that we have to make: to retreat to some Golden Age either deep in the past, or a long way away, or preferably both - or to struggle to fashion a better society, to build on what good has already been achieved, to broaden the protection of human rights - individual rights - and to enhance human happiness. Neither capitalism nor socialism has managed this, yet whatever came before was certainly no better.

I'm intrigued by your admiration for a society [such as Sparta] where one does not have to think for oneself, societies with ' ... a very strict and complex set of rules or laws that governed everyone's behaviour, from when they were born until they died.' Be careful, my dear, that way lies totalitarianism. There's no going back to such ghastly and stagnant social arrangements, thank Christ.

Joe

Dear Poirot,

This may be of interest to you, and others:

http://newmatilda.com/2011/09/22/tax-the-rich

Yes Lexi, it is interesting to see the difficulties that the US govt
has in getting anything done.
I believe their problems are tied up in their fixed four year terms
of office.
Obana cannot say to the republicans, either approve the tax and
medicare legislation or we will go an election.
It is a bit of a madhouse at present where they don't seem to be able
to get a reasonable medicare system for all in operation.
The republicans seem to think anyone who cannot pay for medical
treatment should not have any.
Also when people have been unemployed for a certain period the dole
just stops and they have no income.
I think some of their politicians are simply out of touch with reality.

Belly, do you ever read anything, & perhaps try to understand what you thought you read, before you shoot your mouth off?

I don't recall saying anything about Aboriginals.

In Melanesian Islander society, the so called "one talk" society, the only thing anyone owns is what they carry on them. Everything else belongs to the people of the village.

Even what you carry is not totally yours if a one talk wants/needs it, you must give it. I doubt you can get more socialist than that.

Has anyone noticed that the Chinese economy has only prospered now, after they adopted a completely capitalist economy. They have more billionaires than anywhere else on earth. It's only the communist political system that remains, & that only really in name.

Poirot,
thanks for the link; it's great to see the melt of the ideological Cold War seems to be matching the retreat of the glaciers. Marx was without doubt one of the greatest and most inspirational personages in history. I've used the word "perspective" lately in other threads, and what made Marx unique was his bifocal view of the world. On the one hand his "materialism" incongruously utilised Hegelian idealism (rendering his discussion of the commodity in "Capital" all but incomprehensible to modern materialists and economists) to fathom social dynamics, but on the other hand he was empathically committed to the working-class perspective of his day, to the victims of industrial capitalism. This is what's missing from the modern western perspective today; it's incapable of empathy, of seeing with another's eyes and feeling another's pain, that of the victims and dupes of capitalism.
I have a new book on my desk now called "Debating Varieties of Capitalism". I'm very familiar with the arguments of the genre and they don't stack up. The two main features of all varieties of capitalism, which define it so far as I'm concerned, are 1) the profit motive, which knows no moderation and rationalises every ethical or common sense constraint in favour of rapaciousness and profligacy; and 2) the unfettered accumulation of capital in the hands of private individuals and interests; the stimulus for every variety of corruption and megalomania known to Man. Take away either of these and it would not be capitalism. And yet the profit motive must be diminished for the sake of the planet (which requires moderation), and the accumulation of wealth must be capped so as to simultaneously compromise ambition and the concentrations of power and corruption that entail.
Those other putative versions of capitalism are nothing more than variations on a theme; the price of doing business, grudgingly paid by capitalists during the good times but unsustainable in the long term. Keynesianism is arguably the single biggest reason the system has survived as long as it has--Marx didn't foresee it. It's no longer affordable and class tensions will return.