War: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2024

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

From 1914 to the present, between one hundred and eight million and one hundred sixty million people died in war. War between capitalist powers but also war between capitalist powers and socialist nations—Soviet bloc, Red China, the Third World—has produced mass human casualties. I’m a socialist who believes such forms of socialism were never really socialist. So-called “real existing socialism” has largely failed and we now live primarily in a capitalist world run by an international bourgeoisie.

According to the Left, war is only one of the many evils that capitalism causes. Genocide, exploitation, poverty, ableism, ageism, classism, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia—the list is long. When socialism is achieved—when the stateless, classless, global human community is attained—all the above evils of capitalism will disappear. Yeah, right! I’m a socialist, but I’m not an idiot. To illustrate the absurdity of that claim, let’s consider just the prevalence of war.

But first some Marxism.

The classic Renaissance periods of human history (Ancient/Medieval/Modern) was augmented by the Scottish Enlightenment model of human development (Hunting/Pastoral/Agricultural/Commercial Societies). Marx then propounded a stage theory of economic development where humanity passed through “modes of production,” each mode a combination of productive forces and social/technical relations of production. Beginning with classless primitive communism, class societies moved from ancient through feudal to capitalist stages, finally advancing to classless advanced communism. Each class-oriented mode of production is defined by how labor was organized, starting with the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, moving through serf-based feudalism, finally reaching capitalist societies reliant on workers. I consider this Marxist schema vulgar, riven with anomalies like the “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism,” and thus needs to be taken as descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Now let’s consider the mortality figures from a selection of wars throughout history.

The ancient Roman civil wars (Servile and Social) cost between 3 and 5 million lives. The feudal Chinese Three Kingdom War had a death toll of 36 to 40 million. The purely capitalist first World War produced over 40 million military and civilian casualties. The mixed capitalist/socialist second World War drestroyed between 70 and 85 million lives. But the winner is the rise of the Mongol Empire. The Mongol invasions/conquests of Asia and Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries combined various factors; aspects of “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism” (centralized state structure), feudalism (decentralized fief system), and ancient labor practices (enslavement of Turkish and Slavic peoples), resulting in subjugating almost 25% of the world’s inhabitants. Between 40 and 70 million people were slaughtered across Eurasia in a population loss that may have affected up to 11% of the world’s population. Besides gruesome military battles and sieges, the Mongols practiced wholesale massacres, intentional famines, forced migrations, crude biological warfare, genocide and androcide.

At least one billion humans have died in war throughout all of human history, and that figure could easily be doubled without exaggeration. The horrors of class-based human civilization with regard to warfare alone makes the allure—the utopian fantasy—of classless post-capitalist egalitarian communism obvious. Marx’s “mode of production” theory, in bookending class-based civilization with primitive communism and advanced communism, in turn fueled the primitivist myth that our Paleolithic ancestors were peaceful, ecological, goddess-worshipping hunter/gatherers uncorrupted by civilization and science. Put forward by John Zerzan and Paul Shepard, it simplistically reprises Romantic era fantasies of the primeval paradise and the noble savage.

Marx and Engels asserted that Paleolithic humans existed in a state of “primitive communism,” a relatively classless, communalist social order of nomadic hunter/gatherer bands and tribes. These egalitarian societies practiced mutual exchange and resource sharing. Marshall Sahlins argues that such a social order was the original affluent society in which people worked as little as ten to twenty hours a week in order to survive. Such societies were affluent because their members were content with little in the material sense, enjoying more leisure and working less than did members of modern society. But when hunter/gatherer communities experienced environmental drought and famine they tended to become culturally/physically extinct.

Human beings existed for hundreds of thousands of years as nomadic tribal hunter/gatherer societies, “over 99 percent of the time that the genus Homo has existed on the planet, about two million years.” This primitive communism wasn’t a “utopia of basket-weaving peace lovers” (per Dean Burnett) by any stretch. Our early ancestors may not have engaged in the organized lethal violence we call warfare until they developed sedentary agricultural societies, but there is evidence that intergroup aggression often occurred between hunter/gatherer bands in the form of raids to steal foodstuffs and perhaps women. (Engels’ thesis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that primitive matriarchies were overthrown by patriarchal coups intent on securing male lineages for children is inaccurate. Apparently, women have often been considered “spoils.”) This includes observations that modern hunter/gatherers engage in ritual team fighting games to learn and exercise the coordination and motor skills needed for lethal raiding and warfare, suggesting there are elements of sport and pleasure to such homicidal behavior. Then and now, a particularly deadly raid against a small, culturally or ethnically distinct tribe might result in its complete annihilation. In other words, primitive genocide.

There are disputed theories that genocidal violence was used to wipe out the Neanderthals. More evidence of war exists for late Paleolithic massacres at Jebel Sahaba, Sudan, and Nataruk, Kenya, when scenes of human violence started to be depicted in cave paintings. Warfare seems to have begun in earnest with the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.

The problem with anthropological and archeological theories regarding Paleolithic warfare is that there’s virtually no physical evidence pro or con. To repeat, there’s almost no proof for or against primitive warfare. Those who find the lack of evidence an affirmation that hunter/gatherer societies were overwhelmingly peaceful dispute those researchers who would use ethnographic comparisons with historical or modern hunter/gatherer societies to speculatively fill in the gaps of prehistory, accusing the latter of cultural bias. Those who contend that egalitarian Paleolithic hunter/gatherers were peaceful argue that most lethal disputes were personal and directed toward particular individuals, not group versus group conflicts that amounted to raids and blood feuds if not low-level warfare. Hunter/gatherers, being mobile, tended to move to avoid threats and conflict. Only when natural disaster, resource scarcity, territorial impingement or overpopulation put stress on hunter/gatherer societies did they resort to intergroup aggression and killings which on occasion escalated into raids, blood feuds and warfare. To insist that nomadic hunter/gatherers were warlike is to postulate without proof, on gut instinct or from an agenda. Few scientists doubt that prehistoric humans were incapable of murder. What is in question was whether individual, personal killings could transmute into intergroup warfare. Absence of evidence unfortunately is not evidence of absence.

Marx postulated a basic human nature, what he called species-being. Humans are social animals. Their essence, their nature, is in reality “an ensemble of social relations.” To change the totality of social relations is to change that essence. And to change the mode of production is to change aspects of human nature. Some forms of social behavior—language, music, work, play, intoxication, transcendence—seem to have endured throughout human existence—history and prehistory. I’m afraid that war may be one of those persistent social relations, part of the social panoply that constitutes human nature even during Paleolithic times.

This also means that if and when capitalism is overthrown not all the social ills attributed to capitalism will necessarily be eliminated. I purposefully limited the discussion to war so that the whole range of evils (exploitation, racism, sexism, et al) associated with class societies will not also have to be considered. But if war is a fact of human nature, part of classless primitive communism, will war manifest through advanced classless communism? Certainly the countries practicing “real existing socialism” engaged in warfare with each other (USSR/China, China/Vietnam, Vietnam/Cambodia, etc). Then contemplate the war games practiced by the fictional ecological utopia in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia as a way to avoid war.

Whereas I like and love certain human beings individually, I fear and despise humanity collectively and in the abstract. Thus I reverse Dostoevsky’s literary observation. I’ve become more cynical of humanity the older I get. In a previous column discussing alien life and the Drake Equation, I mentioned the “Great Filter Hypothesis” as to why intelligent life might not naturally arise or sustain itself for any length of time. One possibility is that the evolution of intelligence cosmically might go hand in hand with self-destruction so that as life becomes more sentient it becomes more suicidal. Human history seems to bear out that hypothesis as we humans increasingly destroy our own species and the world.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
“Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx (1845)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels (1884)
Les hommes fossiles by M. Boule (1920)
“Social Stratification in Polynesia: a Study of Adaptive Variation in Culture” (1954) and “Stone Age Economics” (1974) by Marshall Sahlins
War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley (1996)
The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech (1999)
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller (2000)
How War Began: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Keith Otterbein (2004)
Reinvention of Primitive Society by Adam Kuper (2005)
The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory by Guilaine and Zammit (2005)
Constant Battles: Why We Fight by Le Blanc and Register (2013)
War, Peace, and Human Nature edited by Douglas P. Fry (2013)
“Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya” by M. Mirazón Lahr et al (Nature volume 529, 1-20-2016)
“Hominin interbreeding and the evolution of human variation” by Kwang Hyun Ko (Journal of Biological Research-Thessaloniki, 2016)
“Coalitional Play Fighting and the Evolution of Coalitional Intergroup Aggression” by Sugiyama, Mendoza, White & Sugiyama (Nature, 6-29-2018)
https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/long-live-war-whats-left-november-2009-mrr-319/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2021/12/01/alien-life-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-december-2021/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2022/07/01/left-of-the-left-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-july-2022/

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Drugs: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2023

I’m a cat person. At one time my wife and I had three indoor cats. As my wife’s asthma grew worse we let them die of natural causes one by one so that now we’re cat-less.

One of their treats was letting our cats indulge in some catnip. They ate it and rolled in the leaves and stems. Then they would start sneezing, licking, rubbing themselves, stretching, jumping, hopping around, stalking imaginary prey, acting dazed, even drooling. It’s not as if they sought it out but they did enjoy catnip when we gave it to them.

Various animals have an affinity for mind-altering substances. Deer, moose and caribou get high on fly agaric mushrooms. Cows graze on locoweed. Bighorned sheep scrape hallucinogenic lichen. Dolphins squeeze puffer fish for their neurotoxins. And numerous creatures demonstrate a fondness for alcohol—from monkeys, chimpanzees and other primates, birds like lorikeets, cedar waxwings, blackbirds and redwings, various species of bats, to insects like bees and fruit flies. Some of the animals that indulge in this panoply of drugs become dependent on them, showing signs of addiction, and experience withdrawal when access to those drugs is removed.Hominids have indulged in alcohol for some 200 million years and hominins for over 8 million years, a primate-alcohol dynamic called the “drunken monkey hypothesis.” Our primate ancestors may have developed our genetic predilection for alcohol from their dependence on ripe, fermenting fruit as their main food source. There is circumstantial proof that Neanderthals and other archaic humans used psychoactive drugs and more significant archeological, anthropological and historical evidence that modern humans have been sometimes avid users of betel nut, khat, kava, nutmeg, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, opium, heroin, marijuana, peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin, etc. The spread of human psychoactive drug use always came with frequent instances of addiction and withdrawal.

I grew up in the overwhelmingly white suburbs of California. The only drugs I was exposed to were the legal and readily available ones—caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. There was secret prescription pill abuse, of course, but the truly illegal stuff—heroin, marijuana, cocaine, etc—was relegated to the poor and people of color. It was when a subculture of literary, nonconformist, nihilistic, downwardly mobile white people—the Beat Generation—came into contact with jazz and poverty that these drugs made their way into mainstream American society. Such drug use was considered “cool” and included experimentation with psychedelics. The beatnik subculture overlapped with the hippie counterculture which was more rock music-oriented, rebellious and idealistic. The concept of “cool” was universalized and the range of experimental drugs broadened.

And that’s when I entered the picture. I joined the counterculture, the New Left, the “Revolution” some time between the Prague Spring and the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968. I started thinking politically, if naively, and committed myself to the left side of the culture wars that had been raging for over a decade by then.

That was roughly the same timeframe that the San Francisco Diggers scattered. David Talbot contends that: “[b]y the time the Summer of Love was over, the Diggers leaders had all drifted off to country communes, celebrity entourages, hard drugs, the Hell’s Angels, or all the above,” which was a premature assessment. Digger groups were active throughout the end of 1967 and into 1968 when the Diggers Free City Collective held their last San Francisco event, a summer solstice celebration, on Monday, July 1, 1968. The reasons posited for their demise, however, were correct enough. The San Francisco Diggers emerged in 1965 from the nexus of “the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement.” The Diggers combined “street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the Park, and distributing ‘surplus energy’ at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.)” One of the more infamous Digger leaders, Emmett Grogan, took issue with the Left’s insistence that: “[O]ne had to be either a Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, or hold to some combination of these ideologies, or else be politically categorized an anarchist. All these radical labelers ever did was read, write about or discuss the different revolutionary theories, dealing with semantics, while […] the Diggers refused to discuss publicly or define the political dialectics of the work they never ceased to continue to do. Work which was alien neither to Marxism or Maoism but at the time needed neither to endure.”

Grogan was born a streetwise working class Brooklyn kid named Eugene Leo Grogan (aka Kenny Wisdom), who got addicted to heroin before a teenager, then kicked the habit, won a scholarship to an elite private school, pursued a lucrative career as a Park Avenue burglar, and “retired” to Italy. He briefly attended Duke University after high school. When Grogan returned to his heroin habit in San Francisco he arguably helped contribute to the downfall of the Diggers.“Emmett struck me with a needle twice,” Peter Coyote writes in his introduction to Grogan’s book Ringolevio when Emmett first pierced his ear. “The second time […] the needle was a syringe, loaded with heroin. ‘It’ll change ya,’ he said, and it changed a lot. […] I began the process of ruining a heretofore healthy body […] Emmett’s road petered out ‘at the end of the line’ of the Coney Island subway April Fools Day 1978 – some twelve years later, where his body was found, dead of an overdose.”

Of the counterculture’s various drugs grass was just pleasure and fun, acid was the key to transcendent reality and junk was “associated with creative luminaries like Basquiat, Cobain, Jagger, and Joplin. […] [H]eroin has retained a certain allure, the reigning drug of genius. Those who die at its hands — the famous ones, at least — don’t just die, but flame out terrifically, having ‘lived too hard’ and ‘felt too much’ but barely scratched the surface of their potential.” But alcohol does far more damage physically and mentally and is harder and more dangerous to withdraw from than heroin.

“The Good Earth communards took up where the Diggers left off” in 1968 “but in many ways they were tougher and more resilient. The core group within the commune were life-hardened young men and women—ex-cons, Vietnam veterans, streetwise runaways—who knew how to survive. They called themselves a church and claimed pot as their sacrament, and they preached the usual peace and love philosophy. Still, they were no pushovers. They loved their neighborhood, but they knew it was turning into a jungle, with violent predators and vicious cops around every corner. Good Earth made it widely known that it was prepared to defend its turf.”

The Good Earth Commune was smaller in numbers, but more tightly organized and disciplined than the Diggers; nine well-armed houses in the Haight that were part of the second hippie settler wave when the Haight-Ashbury became a dangerous place overrun by junkies, speed freaks, dope dealers and corrupt cops. The Good Earth made their money from selling “soft” drugs—marijuana and LSD—but at first they forbade members from using, let alone selling, anything harder. One of their main internal debates was whether something was a “soft drug” or a “hard drug,” and that debate resurfaced in 1974 when cocaine started making the rounds in San Francisco. Ultimately, the Good Earth Commune’s leadership decided cocaine was a soft drug, a fatal mistake.“Drugs and money were our downfall,” Steve Kever said. “We became very self-indulgent; we got seduced by all the flash. There was suddenly huge amounts of money from dealing coke, and we had access to a kind of lifestyle that people can only dream of. We had been a hard-working hippie commune, and suddenly people were giving you their flashy cars when they got tired of them because they wanted something flashier.”

The distinction between soft and hard drugs that eventually brought down the Good Earth was debated by a number of countercultural scenes, most notably the Motherfuckers in New York City and the Provos/Kabouters in Amsterdam. And without venturing into Straight Edge puritanism, I don’t think it’s possible to draw a hard and fast line between such categories of drugs. There is really no such thing as a drug that does not have some bad side effects or detrimental consequences. As I’ve mentioned, one of the most dangerous “hard drugs” is one of the most socially and historically accepted, that being alcohol. In my day we were in search of the strongest marijuana we could find, with Colombian Gold much sought after. But by today’s standards of potency, the marijuana in the 60’s was dirt weed. Medical marijuana proponents today argue that cannabis is not very dangerous or can be made relatively safe with vaping or ingesting. Yet heavy use of high-potency cannabis is now being linked to schizophrenia, particularly among young men.

It’s hard to imagine our cats seeking out, demanding or doing crimes for high-potency catnip.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
http://www.diggers.org
Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps by Emmett Grogan (1972)
Introduction to Ringolevio by Peter Coyote (1990)
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot (2012)
“The heroin mystique” by Alyssa Giacobbe (The Boston Globe, 2-23-2014)

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