Sounds way better.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Wait a minute, you trying to tell me that anarchy was better??
A collective society for the benefit of all instaed of a few
Sure they had slaves and the typical patriarchal society where women were treated like property, but at least you never had to worry about leaving your tipi unlocked, those were the good old days.
Umm some indigenous peoples were matriarch societies, and many were matrilineal land ownership.
What a load of revisionist / "noble savage myth" horseshit. See e.g. the punishments used by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for theft.
Every society has had theft. Every society has had thieves. Every society has had to deal with this.
What I will note is that native Americans didn't invent the prison-industrial complex.
Trump's trying to bring back the exile/deport for crimes thing at least.
One can do a deep dive in how American Native Peoples dealt with societal issues. Yes, there absolutely were all the same problems we have today, from theft to lazy people to “fame” issues. Look up “Shame the Meat” for example. There were also punishments, some severe.
So the idea that tribal societies had it all figured out is absurd. They were people too, and had problems like anyone else.
It is the "noble savage myth" if it is a quote from a leader in the Lakota nation? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Fire_Lame_Deer
Yes.
"Can people incorrectly lionize the past of their own cultures, a past they never even experienced and don't even have the excuse of nostalgia for?"
[quick glance at any number of reactionaries, revanchists, and nationalists]
Yes. Next question.
It's not credited, there's just a picture of an indigenous person that people aren't expected to recognize. The image is meant to imply that this is how all indigenous people lived by not specifying, using the words of one singular person from one singular nation to do so, which may not even be true to such an extent. The image is taking the quote and using it to perpetuate the myth.
There is no theft if you don't have a concept of ownership or value wealth.
See e.g. the punishments used by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for theft.
Well it doesn't look too bad:
Theft [in Haudenosaunee/Iroquois society] was comparatively rare, for land was the property of the community, surplus food was commonly shared with needier neighbors, and the long bark dwelling belonged to the maternal family, and the personal property like the tools and weapons of the men, the household goods and utensils of the women, were so easily replaced that they possessed little value. Practically the only objects open to theft were the strings of wampum beads that served both as ornaments and currency; but such was the value the community of spirit of the Iroquoians, so little did they esteem individual wealth, that a multitude of beads brought neither honor nor profit except so far as it gave the owner an opportunity to display his liberality by lavish contributions to the public coffers.
– The Indians of Canada, D. Jenness (1934), pg. 135-139, excerpted in The Iroquois: A Study in Cultural Evolution, by F. G. Speck (1945) pg. 32-33
[In Tsalagi/Cherokee society] Rather than coercion and punishment, social sanctions like ridicule, withdrawal, and ostracism, were used to bring wrongdoers and non-conformists back into harmony with the community.*
The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois also practiced slavery, including ritual torture and mutilation.
Native people are people -- they possess the same capacity for good and evil as anyone else. The only difference is they lacked the industrial capacity for cruelty other cultures had.
Especially when they began trading in the fur trade for guns, they created their own little fiefdoms for hunting, which meant keeping other tribes off their land.
I do want to be clear: I am not excusing what was done to the Native Americans or any other native people by colonizers -- it's inexcusable.
But regardless of good intentions: the "Noble Savage" myth is racism and it needs to die as it's an erasure of agency.
I hate to criticize your source on this one, but "The Indians of Canada, D. Jenness (1934)" is not going to be a reliable authority on native american culture. At that point in history we still had to deal with shit like Just One Drop policies, and although Jenness was a great deal less shitty than many others at the time, the cultures he had access to weren't representative of the cultures as they stood pre-genocides.
I'll take your word for it, just looked it up since I knew little about them.
I'm sure they lied plenty as justification for scummy behavior but on this particular topic it looks like a genuine and objective description to me.
He could've made up stuff to depict them as violent savages but that isn't the case here.
Positive racism is still racism - all Asians are good at math, all black people are good at sports, all native american cultures were noble and didn't have crime. At the very least a canadian anthropologist in 1934, while they may not have been actively perpetuating the cultural genocide, would still have been describing cultures in the midst of being genocided.
This noble savage stuff sounds great, but native americans not culturally monolithic so these sweeping generalizations just aren't accurate.
Is there no other conclusion than racism, positive or negative?
As I said and AFAIK " it looks like a genuine and objective description to me".
"in the midst of being genocided" does not define the perspective of every individual.
I'm sure there were positive, negative and neutral articles written about jews during WW2.
Very few would have been written by the german government, though.
Again, no, I do not think that Diamond Jenness was necessarily racist - I do think that what they were writing about were cultures actively being genocided by the institution they were working for, at a time period where native people were barely considered human, and the perspective they present will be necessarily colored by that.
Definitely sounds better than what it is now
How can there be theft if literally nobody owns anything?
personal property ≠ private property.
no one owned the land, but if someone took all my clothes that would be theft.
They still had private property. You try to take a man's only horse and you think he is going to be okay with it?
They had "personal property", property that is movable and possessable; chattel or personalty.
But they most assuredly did not have "private property,", ownership of immovable, "real property" by non-governmental entities. Who can own a lake or a sky? Obviously that belongs to all of us.
It's a minor phrasing difference but is foundational to out understanding of class inequality.
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I do really think that in small communities, there would be no problem abolishing the police. But the problem I see which I don't think I've seen a good argument for, is how it can work at scale. We generally live in much larger and denser communities than the native peoples lived, so it seems like the strategies they used to handle bad-actors won't work in the same way for us.
Here's something to think about:
Why do we live in much larger and denser communities now?
For the majority of human existence we've lived in rural communities. What drove the urbanisation of rural populations?
During covid many places saw the reverse, ruralisation of urban populations. In an anarchist utopia that has removed capitalism, do you think people would stick with large dense urban environments or, like during covid, begin to ruralise again?
If you're unsure of what your opinion is on these questions. Somewhere to start could be looking at the Scottish Highland clearances, the Industrial Revolution in the UK, and the textile industry of the British Empire. All are major factors as to why Scotland urbanised. Most countries urbanised for similar reasons, but these examples are very well documented and very overt so make it more clear than many other places do.
I feel that this is relevant to the discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Behavioral sink is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior that can result from overpopulation.
Many [female rats] were unable to carry the pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep.
Having reached a level of high population density, the mice began exhibiting a variety of abnormal, often destructive, behaviors including refusal to engage in courtship, and females abandoning their young. By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction. Though physically able to reproduce, the mice had lost the social skills required to mate.
"Calhoun's work was not simply about density in a physical sense, as number of individuals-per-square-unit-area, but was about degrees of social interaction."
Obviously rodent studies are only so applicable to humans, but I see myself and worrying modern societal tends in some of their behavior and the ways they suffer.
I think that when we interact with too many strangers every day that we're unable to make meaningful connections with any of them, leading to stress and illness. If we had few enough encounters that we could come to recognize most of them, it would build trust and a sense of community.
as someone who's work has me gradually increasing the number of people i meet on a regular basis... this is interesting LOL
feels like this is, ultimately, the work of organizing
We can also just look at the reasons people today still live in densely populated cities, despite big drawbacks such as the cost of housing. Proximity to jobs, universities, recreation options, grocery stores, and more. It makes perfect sense that during COVID when much of these benefits were essentially eliminated due to lockdowns, that the negatives began to outweigh the positives for many people, and so they moved away.
I don't know exactly what your idea of an anarchist utopia looks like, but if it still involves things like universities, a wide variety of available jobs, various recreational activities, etc. then I don't see why the desire for people to live in cities would change?
Also, not really related to my main point, but still: Yes throughout history we generally lived in rural communities, but this was not due to desire but necessity. For most of history small areas simply could not sustain large numbers of people, not too mention the other problems like housing and disease. But once we worked out how to sustain ourselves, we started living in larger and larger groups. It just so happens that some of these problems were solved under capitalism.
You've not thought about this for very long, but almost instantly replied to me as if I'm trying to argue with you.
Why do people base their life upon work? Moving closer to where jobs are. This isn't a thing people do because they want to but because they need to. Because capitalism demands it.
Universities don't need proximity, as evidenced by the UK's largest and arguably most left wing university in the country. But again, people move close to them because of a sense of need, not want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University
Recreation, do rural people not have recreation? Many recreational centres being in cities is due to the centralisation of populations. It's perfectly viable to have recreational venues spread across an area when the chase of profit is no longer the driving goal.
Grocery stores, lol.
I'm not saying cities will disappear or that there will be no need for them. But there's certainly no need for countries like the UK to have over 10% of the population within one city and over 80% of the entire population living in urban environments. It results in misery, mass pollution, unsustainable practices as everything must be transported, and as you originally noted, issues with enforcement of civility.
Cities will forever be a thing in human society I'm sure, but current cities are an abomination due to the constant centralisation of power and wealth. Never before has human civilisation been so centralised into so few places and it has created a myriad of problems. It's time for a change on our perspectives beyond the constant chase of wealth, there's plenty to go around if it weren't hoarded by a select few as our current system enables.
I posted about my doubts about a concept due to scalability. Was your response to that not an argument for why scalability need not be a concern? Maybe I misunderstood it.
Also, your condescension is unnecessary. You don't know how long I've been thinking about something.
In what way does capitalism require moving close to your job? The line between want and need in these situations is very thin. They need to work, and they want to not spend much of their day commuting. If they didn't have to work at all they might prefer to live elsewhere, but in a world where they do have to work, they would rather live closer to work. Though afaik abolishing capitalism does not mean abolishing the need to work (though it would greatly reduce the amount of work)
For universities and recreation you seem to be saying it is not necessary to live in a city to access, which I agree with, but it's irrelevant. The fact is that people still do live in cities because they want to live closer to university, or they want to have access to a wide variety of recreational activities. Even without a profit motive, having a large number of people nearby is a good reason to build recreational centres, and having access to a wide range of recreational activities is still a good motivation to live in a place. On top of this, many dense population centres are around natural sources of recreation which cannot be simply built elsewhere, like beaches, mountains, rivers, lakes, etc.
You don't have to convince me that cities as they exist now are generally terrible, I totally agree with you. But evidently a huge number of people still think it is worth living in cities, and if cities/ high population centres in general still exist even without capitalism, then the scalability of a system is still very much a valid concern, no?
Ya. Some of the problems we encounter are a result of civilization and not just capitalism. Not that the effects of either are to be diminished.
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