CLASS ANALYSIS

CH—Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.

There is a word for these people. Traitors.

These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.

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.