“Part of our series Worlds Apart, exploring cosmology, ecology, science fiction, and the many ends of capitalist society.”
“In a critical review, archaeologist Carolyn Nakamura accuses Graeber and Wengrow’s work of lacking the “critical, emancipatory gesture of refusal” that characterizes the thought of Walter Benjamin in his famous work “On the Concept of History.””
“At the same time, Nakamura’s accusation that Graeber and Wengrow’s work lacks Benjamin’s “critical, emancipatory gesture of refusal” is ironic, since The Dawn of Everything places this very capacity at the center of their theory of historical change. My aim here is to persuade you that not only does Graeber and Wengrow’s work live up to Benjamin’s demanding standard of historical materialism, but carries his concept of history even further”
“By providing new perspectives on the concept of a classless society, and elaborating a “structural principle” that allows for new constellations between present and past, Graeber and Wengrow open up surprising new perspectives for both historical research and — hopefully — political struggle”
“The Dawn of Everything opens with an epigraph by Carl Jung: “We are living in a time of kairos, the right time for a metamorphosis of the Gods — i.e., of the fundamental principles and symbols.”4 The concept of kairos or “now-time” (Jetztzeit in German) figures heavily in Benjamin’s concept of history, characterizing both the moment of political action and “the very present in which [the historical materialist] is writing.””
“Benjamin criticizes what has come to be called ‘vulgar Marxism’ as a form of historicism, on account of its tendency to posit communism as an inevitable future resulting from laws of historical motion”
“Graeber and Wengrow’s critical intervention is strikingly analogous in its aim. While it might have disappeared from the rhetoric of the revolutionary left, the duo identifies contemporary avatars of historicism everywhere”
“The historian’s task, as Benjamin first theorized it — and as Graeber and Wengrow enact it — is to explode the continuum of history and rescue the memory of these past struggles, as a condition for political action that could redeem the defeated”
“We have to bear in mind that Benjamin’s unique theological materialism required a commitment to both secular historical research and theology”
“As a materialist, Benjamin’s conception of history was influenced by and engaged with the anthropological and archaeological research of his day. In reflecting on this triadic messianic structure, Benjamin drew not only upon Marx and Engels, but also from Jakob Bachofen, the influential interpreter of archaeology and anthropology. For Benjamin, Bachofen “swept aside everything that nineteenth-century common sense had imagined about the origins of society and religion.””
“Yet, as a theological materialist, he believed that the myth of the Fall from the Garden of Eden expressed a truth that the findings of secular research could not. In his view, revolutionary experience is in solidarity with all struggles against class society since its origins”
“the original classless society was a secular fact with an enduring unconscious legacy, central to the messianic task of redemption”
“What if the way to calm the storm is to close the gates to Paradise? In secular terms: what happens to our concept of history when the “original classless society” is displaced from the point of origin?”
“A central argument in The Dawn of Everything maintains that the triadic messianic structure of Paradise—Fall—Redemption obfuscates our understanding of human historical experience, and therefore should be rejected full stop”
““Sweeping aside” key aspects of Bachofen’s work, contemporary archaeology no longer supports the idea that early human societies shared any single original form of human organization”
“What Bachofen meant for Marx, Engels, and Benjamin, Graeber and Wengrow’s work should mean for us”
“Rather than a stage of original equality before the introduction of agriculture and private property (a lá Rousseau), or a state of original warfare of all against all (per Hobbes), there was a “carnival parade of political forms” extending as far back as the archaeological evidence stretches”
“Against an “original egalitarian society” as the secular correlate of Paradise, the record suggests many variations of human organization, frequently shifting seasonally — some hierarchical, some more egalitarian, some switching regularly between many different combinations of social values”
“Against a generic and propertarian concept of a “classless society” Graeber and Wengrow propose a theory of “free peoples,” all of which, whatever their inequities, manage to institutionalize three basic forms of political freedom: the freedom to leave and expect you will be welcomed with hospitality elsewhere; the freedom to disobey the commands of others; and the freedom to participate in reshuffling social arrangements, seasonally or permanently”
“These freedoms, they argue, were taken for granted for much of human history, and are always, to some degree, present in all human civilizations”
“Ironically, this means that free peoples are characterized by the ability to unmake themselves”
“But even moreso, they tend to be marked by an “emancipatory refusal” to be like other peoples they interact with, a willingness to disobey or separate from their own people, and in so doing, to become a different people altogether”
“What is in question here is nothing less than the conditions for the possibility of the diversity of human cultures, in which, according to Graeber and Wengrow, collective refusal plays an important role”
“Alongside these three fundamental freedoms, Graeber and Wengrow also identify what they regard as the three basic forms of social domination: control over violence, control over information, and charismatic control”
“When they become institutionalized as a dominant social principle, they are transformed into sovereign power, bureaucracy, and competitive politics”
“This is a “science of history” that aims not at identifying laws of social development that would erase or reduce human agency or desire, but at identifying the basic structures by which historical action is made or suppressed”
“This theory of three independent forms of domination, each with distinct origins, allows Graeber and Wengrow to ditch the question of the “origins of the state” and of class society. Since there was no single Fall into hierarchical domination, the transitions between modes and orders of domination appear rather as a drifting together of different forms which have also existed distinctly or in tandem with another — and which have been destroyed at different times through a combination of factors, including revolutionary political movements”
“Graeber and Wengrow’s theory of basic political freedoms aims to supply a non-deterministic, non-teleological, and non-reductive factor in ethnogenesis: freedom as a necessary condition for the possibility of the diversity of human social forms, cultural practices, even languages encountered by the ethnographic and archaeological record”
“The basic freedoms articulate the “capacity to make history” as a fundamental human power, available to everyone for as long as the human species has existed”
“Classless societies, recast as free peoples, are those social forms that institutionalize their own contingency, holding open the possibility of fundamentally remaking social life — or at least the freedom of people to leave and do so elsewhere”
“Contra the triadic messianic structure, history is better understood not as a determinate period of time or linear course of development, but a fundamental human capacity to experiment with how to live”
“None of these was an original state of innocence or equality; all were rather historical achievements of people engaged in struggles over the values they wanted to shape their lives”
“The question facing revolutionaries — including revolutionary historians — is not “what is the origin of inequality?” — so that it may be uprooted from the world for good — but “how have we become stuck?””
“How have we, as a species with a legacy of wild experimentation in different ways of living, who have created fascinating and enduring free societies in the past, become stuck in a narrow range of political forms that have spanned the globe?”
“Benjamin’s historical materialism, while it stands opposed to any teleological conception of history as a law-bound progression toward inevitable revolution, is not opposed to all possible “universal history.” Such a history requires a “structural principle” allowing the whole of history to be represented in its parts:
Universal histories are not inevitably reactionary. But a universal history without a structural [konstruktiv] principle is reactionary. The structural principle of universal history allows it to be represented in partial histories. It is, in other words, a monadological principle. It exists within salvation history.”
“Consider the historicist approach: any past moment is interpreted in terms of what comes next, the higher stage of complexity it is becoming. Within this reactionary universal history, the meaning of the past lies in its status as a step along the path of development”
“Benjamin is here pointing to the possibility of a universal history that inverts this relationship: the whole of what is at stake in human history is present within each historical moment, “in a constellation saturated with tensions.””
“Through engagement with the political situation in the mode of now-time, new chambers to the past are opened,37 revealing secret affinities across time now conceived of as the “tradition of the oppressed,” which teaches that “the ‘state of emergency’ which we live is not the exception but the rule.””
“The practice of these freedoms to refuse the existing social order by leaving, by disobeying, and ultimately by rearranging social life describes the substance of revolutionary historical change itself, while the institutionalization of these freedoms as organizing principles of life is synonymous with the creation of a classless society, in the sense of free peoples”
“What is in question is a framework for a universal history that centers the emancipatory gesture of refusal as the very condition for historical change, revealing a history full of revolutionary social movements that went on to birth new cultures”
“Graeber and Wengrow’s three freedoms ought to be understood not as abstract formal freedoms or rights codified in a constitution, but as real possibilities that are either present in a concrete way in the now of action, or they are not”
“It is within now-time that one escapes a king, a plantation, or a husband; it is within now-time that one disobeys a boss, a cop, a priest, or some other clown; it is within now-time that one makes a promise to remake collective life”
“The moment one enters this present of action, one grasps that it has been there all along, that people have been escaping and disobeying and remaking from the beginning”
“The existence of free peoples has nothing to do with any prehistoric innocence; it is the direct result of political decisions to marginalize forms of domination, and of successful exoduses or revolutions against domination, sometimes in institutionalized form”
“Free peoples were not the blind products of tradition, nor inhabiting a mystical and incommensurable world, but self-conscious and conflictual political achievements, revolutionary successes made by real human beings”
“To return to Benjamin’s angel, I’m suggesting that, for our understanding of history, Graeber and Wengrow have calmed the storm blowing from Paradise by closing its gates, removing from materialist historiography the myth of original innocence and the triadic messianic structure it implies”
“It was from Paradise that the storm called progress was blowing. In closing these gates, the angel of history may fold their wings to see the catastrophe — in which we still reside — within its wider context: not as the whole of history, but as one of many islands of domination within a sea of free experimentation in what it means to be human”