Despite whatever nonsense you may have been led to believe by grifters and people with an agenda, prehistoric human society was extremely egalitarian and decentralized. They didn’t tolerate bullies and they didn’t let anyone try to rule over everyone else. It’s precisely because of this decentralization and community-level organization that our ancestors survived. If anyone became too greedy or tried to start ordering people around, they got ostracized. If they really became a problem, using violence or coercion to get the way, they would get exiled or executed. These were the traditional values that made our species the one that outlasted all our order hominid rivals. It was reflected in their religion too; animism isn’t a religious system that focuses on gods who bully everyone around. It’s about harmony with your community, human, spirit, or otherwise.
This egalitarian pseudodemocratic societal organization lasted all the way into the early era of written history. This was how it worked all the way up into predynastic Sumerian society. Leadership roles, called Ensi, would be elected temporarily in times of crisis but were dissolved as soon as the crisis ended. Otherwise there were no individual leaders, only the counsel of working class people who collectively made the decisions.
It was only the centralization of food supply from farming efforts in the steppe that eventually led to the ability of greedy individuals to amass enough wealth and influence to claim sole leadership. They monopolized the food supply and then everyone had no choice but to work for these newly declared kings, or starve. Plus they had this new thing called writing they used to keep receipts on who owed who what, and this new invention called money they used to do it with. Plus, now they were saying that the gods were the ones who gave them the right to own this power. They didn’t have any proof, but their guards were happy to put a spear in your side if you spoke out against this new ruling class that your ancestors never would have tolerated.
It’s precisely because of this fact that the key to the global liberation of the working class lies first in the decentralization and democratization of the food supply by utilizing the power of the technology of permaculture gardening. It turns out that if you work in tandem with nature instead of against it, growing food in overabundance becomes pretty easy. If every community grows itself a permaculture food forest and can feed itself independent of the ruling class elites ability to profit from it, then they stop being so reliant on their monopolistic rule. Suddenly their insurmountable positions of power will start to look pretty flimsy.
Industrialization requires centralization. An unplanned economy is a disaster. We only need to look at the level of suffering our unplanned economy has created globally as evidence to just how inefficient the imaginary hand of the market is at guiding anything. However, centralization breeds tyranny. No individual or collective is strong enough to have no interest, therefore nobody can be trusted to rule.
However, thanks to technologies such as the afformentioned permaculture and things like 3D printing and open source technology, the means of production could very well become democratized in the purest possible sense. The ultimate goal should be to make things as decentralized as possible, so no individual has the right to hoard enough resources to claim to be the master of anything but his own backyard. This is only possible with community organizing and a shifting of values away from authoritarianism and hierarchy, towards democratization and egalitarianism.
Nobody has a monopoly on truth. No matter how much they try to lock ideas up, they have no owners. Every brain that knows them has a copy and has an much right to it as anyone else. Technology is just ideas put to use. The right idea in the wrong place can liberate the world. Ownership in this sense is just a claim backed by a promise of violence under non-compliance with their orders. Governments are just mobs who try to claim a monopoly on violence; who promise to hurt you if you don’t obey. That’s just bullying with extra steps. So why do you let them claim they own anything (beyond their personal property) at all. Laws without an army to enforce them (the police are just an army with manners) are just threats on a piece of paper. You’ve let a group of bullies convince you to do their dirty work for them at your own expense. You might say oh but we voted, it’s we the people. Really? Then why were the ones who wrote those founding documents and made all those grandiose claims about representing the people only a handful of bougerois white cishet men? That doesn’t sound like representation to me, that sounds like dictatorship with a populist complex.
Liberation and true societal improvement comes only when oppression dies. That means the death of bigotry, violence and economic suppression. Until that day comes when nobody anywhere is being oppressed, there is no liberty at all.
So what do you say? Maybe it’s time to bring back real traditional values; the values of our prehistoric ancestors that wanted nothing to do with gods or kings or masters.
