It is well known by anthropologists that hunter-gatherer societies are extremely egalitarian. For example in the journal, Current Anthropology, Vol. 35, No 2 (April 1994) online here, on page 176 one reads, "Yet the universality of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherers suggests that it is an ancient, evolved human pattern." This Big Fact contradicts the Big Lie that human nature is innately selfish and that inequality is simply what human nature inevitably produces.
In this regard it is worth reading a passage from Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. In his chapter, "Mutual Aid Among Savages," he writes about the "Hottentots, who are but a little more developed than the bushmen":
"Lubbock describes them as 'the filthiest animals.' and filthy they really are. A fur suspended to the neck and worn till it falls to pieces is all their dress; their huts are a few sticks assembled together and covered with mats, with no kind of furniture within. And though they kept oxen and sheep, and seem to have known the use of iron before they made acquaintance with the Europeans, they still occupy one of the lowest degrees of the human scale. And yet those who knew them highly praised their sociability and readiness to aid each other. If anything is given to a Hottentot, he at once divides it among all present--a habit which, as is known, so much struck Darwin among all Fuegians. He cannot eat alone, and, however hungry, he calls those who pass by to share his food. And when Kolben expressed his astonishment thereat, he received the answer: 'That is Hottentot manner.' But this is not Hottentot manner only: it is an all but universal habit among the 'savages.' Kolben, who knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence, could not praise their tribal morality highly enough.
"'Their word is sacred,' he wrote. They know 'nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.' 'They live in great tranquility and are seldom at war with their neighbors.' They are 'all kindness and goodwill to one another.... One of the greatest pleasures of the Hottentots certainly lies in their gifts and good offices to one another,' 'The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the exercise of justice, and their chastity, are things to which they excel all or most nations in the world.'"
The Hottentots are, of course, the same species as us. Their innate human nature enabled them to develop an extremely egalitarian culture. That means that our innate human nature (whatever it may be) enables us to do the same, contrary to the Big Lie of capitalism.
Some defend the Big Lie by arguing that human nature may permit egalitarianism within a tribe, but it also causes tribes to wage war against each other. But the anthropological evidence does not support the assertion, made by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Warmonger in Chief, Barack Obama that "war appeared with the first man." As John Horgan writes in his The End of War:
"The Homo genus emerged about 2 million years ago and Homo sapiens about two hundred thousand years ago. But the oldest clear-cut relic of lethal group aggression is not millions or hundreds of thousands of years old. It is a 13,000-year-old gravesite along the Nile River in the Jebel Sahaba region of Sudan. Excavated in the 1960s, the site contains fifty-nine skeletons, twenty-four of which bear marks of violence, such as embedded projectile points.
"What's more, the Jebel Sahaba site is an outlier. Most of the other evidence for warfare dates back no more than 10,000 years. The oldest known homicide victim--as opposed to war casualty--was a young man who lived 20,000 years ago along the Nile...
"Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and authority on both primates and early humans, believes that our human and proto-human ancestors were at least occasionally violent. Given how often fights occur among virtually all primates, including humans, 'we can be fairly certain that lethal aggression occasionally broke out' in the Paleolithic era, she says. 'It would be amazing if it did not.' But Hrdy sees no persuasive evidence that war--which she defines as 'organized aggression between groups with the intent of killing those in other groups'--is either ancient or innate." [pg. 30-31]
Nor does it require living in primitive conditions for egalitarianism to arise. The modern labor movement, with all its strikes and campaigns for things like the Eight Hour Day, and the social movements against racial discrimination (e.g., the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement) are all examples of the mass support for making the world more equal.
The fact that when polled, most Americans say they want health care to be a right of all people, and furthermore say they would agree to paying higher taxes to make it so, cannot be explained by any theory that includes the capitalist Big Lie about human nature being mainly motivated by self-interest.
Workers often continue their labor strikes far beyond the point when they have any chance at all of making up in higher wages all of the wages they have already lost during the strike, not to mention homes foreclosed for lack of money to make the mortgage payments and cars repossessed. This was the case in the Hormel meatpackers strike in the 1980s in Minnesota. Why do they do this? A striker explained why this way, as recounted by Dave Stratman in his We CAN Change the World (pdf):
"Like the British miners, the striking meatpackers understood that far more was at stake than their specific demands. In a speech to supporters in Boston in February, 1986, Pete Winkels, business agent of Local P-9, made this clear: 'Our people are never going to get back what we've already lost financially. We know that. But we're fighting for our families and for the next generation. And we're not going to give up.'
"Since it was precisely the strikers and their families who suffered the economic and emotional costs of the strike, the explanation that "we're fighting for our families and for the next generation" has to be interpreted in a class context. "For the next generation" was a phrase the strikers used again and again to describe why they were fighting, as if these words encapsulated their feelings about creating a future very different from where things seem headed, not just for their immediate families, but for other people like themselves."
The Hormel strike, and many others like it, was a struggle to make the world more equal; as a fight for merely personal self-interest it would have been crazy to continue the strike, as the strikers well knew.
During the Spanish Revolution that involved millions of people in almost half of Spain in 1936-9 peasants expropriated the land from the rich landowners. They invariably decided to own it collectively instead of dividing it up into parcels to be owned individually. Some collectives abolished money altogether and those that didn't made changes in the direction of economic equality, such as paying people according to the size of their family instead of their education or job type. If the Big Lie of human nature were true it would be very difficult to explain how this could have happened. But it did happen. Economic production by these egalitarian collectives actually increased, by the way, refuting the notion that nobody works in an egalitarian society.
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