Granaries to Overlords: Still a True Story

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In his last book released after his death, Graeber (and cowriter Wengrow) attempts to point to a few isolated examples of prehistory dense settlements to poo poo the basis of anticiv theory: that sedentarism creates authority and that the city in particular is anathema to anarchy. Reds are going to be using this fiction to 'disprove' anti-civ anarchy for decades to come, so I may as well get an early start in responding to its points.

"The Dawn of Everything", published by Penguin Books, attempts to rewrite human history by presenting the advent of Civilization as an awesome project that took a few unfortunate missteps along the way and went astray, but would certainly go back to being awesome if only those missteps (uh the destruction of every ecosystem on the planet culminating in the current unprecedented mass-extinction event) were somehow course-corrected.

The New Yorker:

Drawing on new archeological findings, and revisiting old ones, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the granaries-to-overlords tale simply isn’t true. Rather, it’s a function of an extremely low-resolution approach to time. Viewed closely, the course of human history resists our favored schemata. Hunter-gatherer communities seem to have experimented with various forms of farming as side projects thousands of years before we have any evidence of cities. Even after urban centers developed, there was nothing like an ineluctable relationship between cities, technology, and domination.

The Guardian:

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – inequality is not the price of civilisation.

The so-called “agricultural revolution” – the Neolithic Faustian bargain when humanity swapped egalitarian simplicity for wealth, status and hierarchy – simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.

Note: I haven't read the book yet and this is simply a short response to some of the things people who have read it (just mainstream book critics so far) are saying about it.

The difference between small groups of gatherer-hunters undertaking brief and isolated experiments with agriculture to supplement their continued gatherer-hunter lifestyles and an actual civilization where everyone is wholly dependent on agriculture and permanent settlements is immense.

Graeber pretending that these early aborted experiments prove civilization and the city can be anarchic only betrays his ideological dishonesty.

The reality he's ignoring is that an isolated settlement of a few thousand people who consume grains while millions outside their settlement remain gatherer hunters is not a civilization.

Civilization doesn't stop at a small town's walls - it spreads everywhere, contaminating every inch of the land, sea and air in order to extract and export all resources to the immense and hungry cities.

Civilization doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's not one small town of grain eaters lucky enough to be surrounded by fertile lands that haven't yet been depleted. it's an ever expanding desert, an endless growth, until the civilization runs out of space to grow and abruptly dies from horrible war, famine and disease.

One town of farmers existing in a gatherer hunter world doesn't prove that anarchy thrives in civilization. graeber chooses to valorize a small town of outliers who herded sheep and ate wheat, when there were millions of full time gatherer hunters - anarchists - outside the town's walls whose lives he completely dismisses as uninteresting.

He celebrates these minor agricultural settlements while failing to acknowledge the reality that agricultural settlements can only exist as long as fertile land exists, creating a self-defeating outcome where the settlement eventually runs out of resources and either dies or colonizes lands further and further away from the settlement - lands that are depended on by thousands to millions of nomadic gatherer hunters.

By celebrating the city, the sheep and the wheat and pretending a city can exist without affecting the world around it, he's saying fuck off and die to everyone who lives outside the town's borders. a diverse population that will be extinguished by the city's ever-increasing hunger for extraction of non-renewable resources to feed itself and its growth.

An early sedentary town or two failing to take root and kickstart civilization isn't proof of civilization's potential to exist without hierarchy, it's simply evidence that civilization had a few false starts before enough of these sedentary towns were able to amass the collective authority to march in armies to destroy the vast wilderness that surrounded them and enslave the free peoples that lived in it to work the newly cleared grain fields.

By choosing to go through history with a fine comb to identify obscure tribes with ways of life that mimic his own so he can hold them up on a pedestal while casting shade on the cultures of the majority of humans at the time, graeber is engaging in a form of colonialism that mirrors European colonizers in the 19th century casting all non-Europeans as subhuman heathens and savages for not living in agricultural, industrial nation states.


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