Round Dance at the Salmon Festival of the Columbia River Tribes, Lyle, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Envisioning a society not based on competition, on artificial scarcity, or even one based on a foundational level of respect for every member of society is a concept considered to be fruitless unless you are writing Sci-fi for Lucille Ball (yeah, she was involved in Star Trek). That is to say, it’s a non-starter in serious quarters.

The evidence that human lives proceeded in a very different manner in the thousands and thousands of years prior to wide-scale civilization and agriculture is largely ignored. Many books have been written in regard to the concept, and they do a fine job of articulating it (The Fall by Steve Taylor and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn are stand-outs). The basic concept is that once “the food got locked up” through wide-scale agriculture, then there were those more than happy to hold the keys. These keys produced power differentials and an often artificial scarcity. In association with this, concepts such as lineage and ownership became more prominent and thus, the subjugation and “ownership” of women became a feature.

Prior to this global lockdown of the food, small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers existed in a quite sustainable manner. The tripe about short and brutish lives does not seem to be true in most cases. Basing leisure time as a measure of well-being, those hunter-gatherers spent far more of their time in the pursuit of social interactions and other leisure activities than the workers of today. This has been studied even in modern times with tribes of the Amazon. Hell, even medieval peasants had more days off and less hours spent working for others than the office worker of today. It doesn’t seem to be a normal breakdown of the day to spend 8-12 hours working to maintain shelter and food—increased time for the arts, for love and socialization seems to be more the human baseline need. The inherent inefficiency of having to work for others like our oligarch class increases the workday by magnitudes from what it really should be. Elon’s jets don’t fly themselves. No, they require the input of millions of us working extra minutes of the day for each member of this parasite class.

This situation is probably why so many are unhappy and unconnected, falling into the notion that there is something wrong with them rather than realizing they have been plunged into a world at odds with the........

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