bfinger

Fifty years ago, another ambitious examination of historical development was published. This too drew abundantly from “economists, economic historians, ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists” in order to elucidate patterns of social existence and institutional evolution. This too promised to locate in the remote past of humanity, experiences that have “penetrated into unconsciousness of individuals, there to encounter the echoes from the primitive-communist past, which have never been completely buried by the effects of 7000 years of exploitation of man by man.” This too argued, in effect, that a lost social consciousness would be key to the reassertion of a future freed from economic oppression. David Graeber asserts that communism is in fact one of the basis for all human societies. But, while Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory was written in the context of a cold war in which the fundamental question of social organization was ever present, David begins his quest 2000 years beyond the mist (and myth) enveloped origins of ancient communalism to the beginnings of society already differentiated by class and social function. The current social context is one permeated by a crushing global financial collapse, where – unlike Mandel’s time — the fundamental questions of the class organization of society no longer present themselves as urgent political propositions.
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