Bruce Lerro

BL—When Marx and Engels proclaimed that the first human societies practiced ”primitive communism” they hardly had much company. In the first half of the 20th century two exceptions were the archeologist V. Gordon Childe and later on the anthropologist Leslie White. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that empirical confirmation of hunter-gatherers came forth to be seen in the works of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, Morton Fried’s The Evolution of Political Society and Elman Service’s Primitive Social Organization.
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In the 1980s, evolutionary psychology was born as a discipline devoted to not throwing the Darwinian baby out with the Social Darwinian and Sociobiology bathwater. However, all too often, Darwinian evolutionary psychologists played fast and loose with the term “hierarchy”. They find hierarchies among the apes, breezily survey different types of human societies, and then conclude that hierarchy is a cross-species and universal phenomenon.

BRUCE LERRO—Is it possible to oppose the centrist drift to the middle of the political spectrum by uniting socialists and conservatives? In the United States socialists howl at the prospect of uniting with conservatives. “How stupid” they might say. “Conservatives are pro-capitalists, pro-war and anti-communist. Besides, conservatives want to bring back the power of the church, the aristocrats and the king. What a dumb idea! How could any socialist find common ground with conservatives?” In the first place, our socialist leftist has mixed together two kinds of conservatives, neoconservatives on one hand and reactionaries on the other. There is a very different type of conservative I will be advocating for that comes out the work of Alain De Benoist and the New Right in Europe in his book The Populist Moment which I will discuss later in this article. But first, let’s be explicit about what reactionaries and neocons really stand for.

BRUCE LERRO—Liberal representative democrats commonly assume that democracy means democratic choice with voting as the essence of choice. The reduction of democracy to voting implies that a ready-made agenda exists when none has been agreed on. This deliberative process lends itself neither to quantification nor representation. “Majority wins” is a tribute to the failure of democracy: to our inability to create a politics of mutualism that can overcome private interests. A weak and complacent majority can unthinkingly overrule an impassioned and well-argued minority.

BRUCE LERRO—Calling a society a “liberal” democracy smuggles in other questionable assumptions. For example, it throws into question whether it is possible to have a “conservative” democracy. In their history reactionary conservatives have supported three institutions prior to and after the Great French Revolution – the king, the aristocracy and the church. These conservatives are far more honest than liberals about their class origins and their suspicions about democracy. Yet, they too have been swept up in the wave of democracy which crested at the end of the 19th century. Even conservatives have to mumble that they are democrats if they want to receive votes.

BRUCE LERRO—ith the recent kidnapping of President Maduro by Yankee imperialists, I wonder about how BRICS nations and other countries sympathetic to them such as North Korea and Iran will respond. Venezuela has made an attempt to join BRICS and clearly they are in the socialist camp so I would expect it would be especially important to China. Were BRICS countries and their allies aware of the build-up for the kidnapping and what kind of help did they offer?