Nicolas D Villarreal reviews David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and outlines a theory of social evolution that answers the book’s objections to such theories.
I am not usually the kind of person who greatly anticipates new theoretical books. For me, a good book of theory is usually one that is quite old, as well as one that I stumble on accidentally or finally succumb to after being told for years of its importance. The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow has been perhaps the sole exception. I had read Graeber’s earlier book Debt: The first 5000 Years over one summer while I was in college, and at the time I had been working as an intern at the Federal Deposit Insurance Agency where the regulation of money and debt was of the utmost practical concern for the continued existence of our capitalist society. While I did not always agree with him (for instance, his definition of communism was flat out absurd), the book impressed me in a way that pretty much no other contemporary had before.
Graeber’s ability to write clearly, with expertise, and with such unique insight made him a gem of an author. In my mind, he was instantly canonized as one of the great social theorists of the 21st century, in some ways, through his technical excellence, exceeding the likes of other giants such as Mark Fisher and Slavoj Zizek. It was for these reasons that when I had heard that Graeber had passed away and left a book waiting to be published I genuinely could not wait to read it.
Thus, I found myself digging into The Dawn Of Everything this January, and in many ways it did not disappoint. In one package you can find a review of all the cutting-edge research in archeology and anthropology across the globe and all its human eons, its patterns and lack of expected patterns made bare for everyone to see. This is combined with a polemic against the popular understanding of human social development, what the authors call the “evolutionary” approach.
The evolutionary understanding of history should be familiar. It says that the freedoms of “primitive” societies, those like the native North Americans, are no longer possible due to the social complexity introduced by urban life and the agricultural revolution. Because of greater population density and regular surplus created by permanent agriculture, we got bureaucratic states, private property and a complex division of labor, or so the theory goes.
The authors counter by citing a series of hard data that disrupts this narrative. They point to cities and economically complex societies that lacked agriculture or our notions of private property. On the other hand, the authors contend, agriculture existed for extremely long periods of time without becoming the primary economic activity, and when it did, did not necessarily lead to class societies, private property or the state. In contrast, the authors present the following counterclaims: peoples of free societies could consciously choose their political and social arrangements, and the state has no origin, having no necessary material trigger.
All this is wrapped into a new anthropological framework that Graeber and Wengrow have developed as an alternative to the evolutionary model. This framework centers around three categories of domination: domination via control of violence, control of information and individual charisma. The counterpart to these categories of domination are the three categories of primordial freedom: freedom of movement, freedom to disobey, and freedom to change your social relations. In free societies, what Marx called primitive communism, there was general freedom to leave, a freedom which itself supported the freedom to disobey any kind of serious authority. These societies were characterized by a high degree of mutual aid and sharing of resources as the basis for economic coordination, and many had seasonal changes in social organization or regular festivals where social relations became inverted.
Why were these freedoms lost and replaced everywhere by these systemic forms of domination? How did we get “stuck”, as the authors put it? It’s truly difficult to arrive at a concrete conclusion to this question from the book, which largely rejects systemic answers and instead seeks to fulfill the promise of post-structuralism. Post-structuralism rejected grand narratives and presented the possibility of an understanding of history without them, but it had difficulty following through in the fields of anthropology and archeology. Indeed, for as much as the authors scold their disciplines for being unaware of, and rejecting the consequences of earlier societies having full political consciousness and consciously rejecting the state and anything that might resemble our capitalist societies, these ideas were already being fully articulated by the post-structural theorists Deleuze and Guattari half a century ago. Graeber and Wengrow provide the substance to this strain of thought, however, and are among the first to do so rigorously at this scale given the difficulty in putting together findings from such disparate, specialized fields of research, especially if one begins by rejecting grand narratives from the start.
In order to accomplish this feat, they were forced to largely abandon any real explanation for this erosion of freedom at the center of their book. Using the example of the failure of a Mississippian proto-state that harbored extreme violence as one of the great causes of the rise of free societies in North America, they suggest that the spread of either freedom or domination largely depends on the contingency of history. Structural explanations, the authors contend, are the result of a centuries-old tradition of denying human agency and justifying the destruction of Indigenous people across the globe. Hence their emphasis on discussion and debate in social transitions or in preventing social transitions, as well as on those societies which seasonally change their methods of subsistence and organization.
Graeber and Wengrow are excellent in their roles as anthropologist and archeologist. However, by emphasizing the political life of ancient societies, they stumble into their great weakness: their grasp on political theory. Their three respective categories of domination and freedom are essentially only descriptive, and the third item of each list has serious problems.
When the three forms of domination are put together we are supposed to arrive at “third order” states which describe the modern ones we encounter everyday. However, political domination via individual charisma is only really something that we find in states today with competitive elections or centered around a strongman, it excludes those one-party states where individual charisma is papered over by bureaucratic opacity and proceduralism. While it might be useful to think of western democracies as “aristocracies of charisma” tacked onto a bureaucratic and military apparatus, in a way, these categories uphold the western-centric notion of the end of history being liberal democracy by suggesting that only such states can be the ultimate culmination of domination.
As for the freedom to choose one’s society, this is also quite dubious. Of course, the premise of this book is that this freedom no longer exists, but the evidence they provide that this freedom existed in primordial societies could also be interpreted in other ways. Seasonal changes in social organization is one of the key examples. Graeber and Wengrow point to cases where societies switch their mode of subsistence with the change in seasons, such as hunter-gathering to farming, or hunting to fishing, etc., and accordingly change their social organization to adjust to different economic strategies. The authors note that there is no clear correspondence between certain modes of subsistence and certain modes of organization regarding these seasonal changes, something which disrupts the deterministic logic of traditional social evolution theory. But while this does discredit more mechanical, deterministic theories, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these people were free to choose their own form of society. After all, what we’re seeing is not some grand experiment in human creativity, but a society that is reproducing itself in the same pattern over and over again.
The same problem applies to the millennia during which the technology for large-scale permanent agriculture was known, or easily knowable, but never applied at scale. The fact that agriculture didn’t produce the expected states and class societies, however, doesn’t mean that the prevention of such arrangements was the result of a freedom to select one’s social relations. In fact, it is actually a signal of the conservative function of social reproduction. As even the authors acknowledge, there are many periods in history where scientific achievements are consigned to mere curiosities, hobbies or playthings rather than being employed productively to meet needs. As the liberal institutionalists Acemoglu and Robinson point out in their book Why Nations Fail, many societies actively suppress such technological and scientific achievements whenever they foresee the threat of disruption to present social relations.
When combined with Graeber and Wengrow’s evidence that agricultural societies were not necessarily authoritarian, such a suppression was almost certainly not an expression of a positive freedom endemic to free societies. It was, instead, the same sort of unfreedom that we as political creatures experience today, especially in attempting to move beyond the limits of capitalism to achieve more scientific methods of production capable of better meeting human needs.
The use of the phrase “social reproduction” here in this critique is very intentional, as it is the key to imagining an alternative evolutionary framework. To understand how evolution as a theoretical metaphor applies to the history of human societies we should understand what they have in common with biological species and on what level of abstraction we find these commonalities. Reproduction is one such basic aspect.
Much like biological populations, societies also reproduce themselves, and while this is also predicated on basic biological reproduction it is not identical or reducible to it. What is reproduced is the organization of society, the relations of production. This form of reproduction can fail while biological reproduction continues, and indeed has many, many times throughout our history as a species. One can go up a further order of abstraction and also describe ideas and units of cultural information in these terms, as the would-be science of memetics hoped to do.
The theory of evolution, contra Graeber’s post-structuralism, does have a certain teleology built-in, though it is not quite so simple and deterministic as the social evolution theory Graeber and Wengrow critique. Rather, the full theory of evolution tells us that life, as it reproduces itself, will evolve to adapt to its environment. Species that do not do this well enough face extinction in the long run, thus all around us we find creatures that almost seem “made for” their habitats. Why exactly do living things adapt to their environment? The basic textbook answer is that because the reproduction process does not create perfect copies, those traits among the slight variations which make reproduction easier by fitting better to the environment become more numerous.
To understand how this is an example of a more general process, let’s take evolution in its most basic abstract terms within information theory and statistical mechanics. Life is a localized low entropy system, it reduces entropy locally by maintaining a homeostasis and creating copies of itself—causing raw materials in its environment to take on a similar form. This system itself can be taken as an object, one which is transformed by time, which itself is a product of the ever-increasing entropy of the universe, and that causes all objects to become more correlated to their environment. An asteroid traveling through space will, in the beginning of its “life span”, contain only the information of the process which created it, but as it travels, it will encounter things like debris and cosmic rays which will leave their own marks on its body, thus making the asteroid contain more information about its environment.1
If the process of increasing entropy is allowed to continue uninterrupted for an extremely long period of time, we see the scenario of heat death, whereby all things in the universe become uniformly undifferentiated until no “work” is possible, in other words, there are no longer particular differences in energy levels anywhere in the system. But for all living things, we only experience the maximization of entropy in local contexts. Our whole existence is premised instead on this process of increasing entropy, before we reach the level of maximization, it is why we experience time as a one-directional flow, and why evolution appears to have a direction or teleology as well.
So, too, can we take societies as objects moving through time in the same way as biological lifeforms, being such systems of low entropy maintenance, and therefore expect societies to also become more correlated to their environment through adaptations. The question remains though; what exactly is the environment which they are becoming correlated with and adapting to? The answer is not as obvious as it might seem and the failure of memetics as a science was exactly a failure to adequately answer it. Memetics, to a large extent, assumed that the environment was the same as that of biological evolution, rather than the transcendental structure of the human mind, language, and architecture of communication networks. A society reproducing itself partly competes in both of these domains.
In fact, we can count three levels of abstraction in the environment of social reproduction: ideological reproduction, economic reproduction, and biological reproduction, listed here in ascending order of timescales and primacy. Ideological reproduction occurs on the shortest of time scales, something which happens on an every-day, every-hour basis in our ordinary discussions, creation of art, teaching in classrooms, etc., and it is subordinated to the selection pressures of the higher order systems of economic reproduction, which has its selection pressures arising on a monthly, even yearly level with investment, hiring decisions, and economic crises, last of which is biological evolution, which only sees selection pressures in humans when we’re conceived, die, and in the far more rare crises that threaten our whole species. Each level has its own evolutionary pressures, together creating a meta-environment for human social evolution.
Why does this new approach do better than the social evolution theory attacked by Graeber and Wengrow? The traditional social evolution view differs importantly from actual evolutionary theory in that its object of investigation is not a habitat and all the competing species within, but a single species—treating the whole development of human societies like the development of Homo sapiens as one biological species. This is the understanding of a simple, linear path from walking upright, opposable thumbs, to advanced intelligence. Instead, we should take each society, delineated by culture groups, government, and methods of production, as its own species in a uniquely non-biological taxonomy.
This approach actually isn’t so new. Social reproduction theory and liberal institutional economics each implicitly have this understanding. The authors, unfortunately, do not really engage with these traditions except, in the case of institutional economics, to nit-pick an archeological example they employ.
But without this evolutionary approach and the stochastic teleology it provides, it is impossible to make much sense of a social technology which has come to dominate the globe like the state has. To even engage in the project of explaining the formation of the state is something the authors explicitly reject with their claim that there is “no origin to the state”, and further declaring that such investigation is uninteresting and unimportant. They reduce the rise of the state to the rise of certain kinds of domination, which themselves are the result of the erosion of the primordial freedoms, especially the freedom of movement.
Undoubtedly, the inability to simply move away from authoritarian and tyrannical systems was a large factor in state formation, but why exactly did this tendency occur? It seems the most likely reason is that we simply ran out of space to get up and start new societies, or easily disappear and make a solitary life out of subsistence farming or hunter-gathering. The underlying tendency is then population growth in a region, rather than population density in a locality leading to economic and social complexity, as the original social evolution theorists said. These limits on space would not be the same thing as food carrying capacity in a region, however. Societies necessarily have their information content expressed in physical space; its algorithmic logic embodied in real individuals and their surrounding geography, where they conduct economic activity, where they bury their dead or otherwise consider sacred, and where they actually live and play. Before borders were a real thing some of these places were likely not mutually exclusive to a particular society, yet, it is difficult to imagine that there were no limits to how close new forms of social organization could establish themselves next to one another without presenting themselves as a threat. Thus, as human populations grew, the world became a more limited space, forcing people to choose between what societies presently existed rather than founding new ones limited only by their imagination and their physical reality.
Similar logic, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, was why it was so difficult to create a system of forced labor in Jamestown with either colonists or the Indigenous population.2 The much lower population density of North America meant it was quite easy for both natives and colonists to simply escape into the woods rather than face the extremely exploitative and brutal regime under the Virginia company. Given this tendency for population growth to limit the freedom to escape a given social arrangement, we can also partly explain the reversal of state formation in North America as a function of low population density preserving this freedom in ways that was not possible in the more populated South America and what is today Mexico.
This logic of growth creating vanishing opportunities and alternatives also applies to capital, which is why global economic development and capital deepening mean fewer new markets and ever more unfreedom for international capital. This is in part the basis for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the possibility of a final crisis of capitalism when there is no longer any new major society to industrialize.
At this point, we should take a step back and reassess precisely what state formation means in our new evolutionary framework. First, we have to define what the state is. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that the Marxist definition of the state is simply an organization that exists to protect the power of an exploiting ruling class, and that the problem with this is that the definition of exploitation is somewhat slippery. Yet, this emphasis on exploitation only really applies to the bourgeois state, and to arrive at the broader Marxist definition of the state in all its variations we must begin with Marx and Engels, then move to Lenin, and then finally Althusser. Marx and Engels were clear that the state is an organization that exists to preserve class society, Lenin further clarified that what is being organized is armed individuals, and Althusser elaborated that the logic of this state was the relative maximization of violence compared to all other actors in society; accomplished by ideology and law as rhetorical effects that minimize the violence of these other actors.3 Citing the example of post-civil war America, Engels notes that what seems to be essential to the state is not even standing armies or a bureaucratic administration, which were minimal in America at the time, but rather the politicians creating laws, rhetoric, and ideology capable of organizing violence.4 To combine all this together, we can say that the state is an organized group of armed individuals that acts to preserve existing class society through the maximization of relative violence.
According to this definition, states emerged almost simultaneously with class society. What took some time was the logic of relative maximization of violence. This is the truth behind Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, which stands above society only so long as it can contain the violence of all other actors, which was largely not the case for many primordial societies. Without population growth reducing alternatives to the violence-maxing class societies, this formula is extremely unstable, as the collapse of state formation in North America goes to show. This rudimentary equation only gained stability over time as states gained adaptations through trial and error, failure, and survival. The culmination of this process (which is still ongoing) is today the bourgeois state. It is worth quoting Marx at length in how this occurred in France:
The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state administration. Every common interest was immediately severed from the society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the activities of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth, and the national University of France. Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.5
As the material conditions changed, so too did it eventually make all other forms of society unstable due to external threats, as was the case for the Indigenous people of North America, the matriarchal society of Minoan Crete, and all the various experiments in more free and egalitarian cities described by the authors, all of whom were destroyed either by modern states or heroic warrior societies, the kind which generally crop up around the periphery of urban civilizations. Competition and a changing environment favored the state as an evolutionary adaptation.
At last, we are absolutely capable of creating a teleological evolutionary explanation of the state with Graeber and Wengrow’s evidence, and without any kind of rigid determinism. What The Dawn of Everything uniquely provides, however, is an understanding of the forces that cause evolutionary speciation, something that has been greatly neglected by social reproduction theory and institutional economics for the simple fact that most of recorded history has witnessed the destruction and homogenization of societies around the world. But in order for such homogenization to occur, something must have driven societies to be diverse. The conventional narrative that societies became unique due to their isolation is undermined by the authors who point to the consistent evidence of connections between cultures thousands of miles apart. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow identify a force they call schismogenesis (literally “creation of division” from Greek) whereby societies consciously reject characteristics of nearby societies that they consider an Other.
Where the authors get into trouble with this concept is how they insist that it is essentially a form of freedom by virtue of its conscious and deliberate nature. Such an interpretation ignores how the overhang of a big Other can entrench social control and facilitate the reproduction of an existing society. The explicit and mutual rejection of the USSR and USA is a good modern example, whereby some outside threat, whether material or moral in nature, was used to cement power in both societies. When the impact of the USSR or the United States increased freedom in the other it wasn’t a result of rejection, but in the acknowledgement of alternative possibilities to the way things are. Schismogenesis then only seems to cultivate freedom in those societies that are already relatively free and exposed to a neighbor with much more social domination, as it did for Athens contra Sparta, North versus South in the American civil war, and free versus slave in pre-colonial societies of the Pacific Northwest.
Human beings are conscious creatures. We debate and justify and critique our societies, even when we have little to no control over its development in a particular moment. Graeber and Wengrow’s intervention is useful in reminding us that there is no pre-political human society, that ideology and politics are truly transhistorical. What they miss, due to their poor understanding of political theory and their anarchist politics, is that ideology and politics are also the source of our profound unfreedom, which only gives way to the radical freedom of possibility during a crisis of social reproduction, and even then only when the ultimate outcome of our plans and actions are most difficult to know. This is true even of the most participatory political and economic system, which must reproduce itself or vanish from the face of the earth.
In other words, the freedom to choose one’s own society as the authors pose it, is a fiction.
When we take the project of the two Davids in total, one can see it is the synthesis and application of both 70s post-structuralism and its progenitors in Young Hegelianism, especially Stirner and Feurbach. With post-structuralism the authors ask us to decenter history away from the present, as evolutionary theories such as Marxism do, and focus on the moments “in between” without the presence of grand civilization. In particular, they point towards the experience of societies which seemed to grow for some time without central authority or extreme domination. For those of us living within global capitalism and powerful states, however, we are out of luck, left only with reassurances about the radical contingency of history, even if those few attempts to consciously change society in modernity away from capitalism all ended in failure. The price of this radical embrace of contingency is an equal rejection of the possibility of a historical social science and the study of material causality in history.
If there is any causal explanation at the back of The Dawn of Everything, it is to be found consciously in the force of discursive critique and unconsciously in the social conception of the sacred. In Graeber’s and Wengrow’s telling, it was the Indigenous critique which moved European thinkers to freedom and enlightenment. Whether or not their case is overstated in terms of authorial citations is besides the point. This kind of genealogy of thought is fundamentally idealist. Though they are careful not to lay too much blame on individual thinkers like Rousseau, which many conservatives did, there is a strong strain of thought in the book that implicitly lays the blame of our present situation on ourselves as ordinary people. It follows from their line of reasoning that as a mass of people in the West, we are poor thinkers, lacking good faculty for rational debate compared to that of free societies. We are “spooked” in the words of Max Stirner.
For us, such ideas as private property, monetary exchange, debt, state legitimacy, and the organic unity of the nation are sacred concepts placed above ourselves, which we mistake for divine authority. It was the force of the sacred which cowed the people of the first civilizations and states, making them build vast pyramids and accumulate wealth, rather than, in the first place, the power of authoritarian rulers themselves. At a certain level, this account, much like Stirner’s, is absolutely correct. We are spooked. If there is any truly great surprise in the book it is that there is a validation of Stirner’s system on an anthropological level: those societies which reject the sacred as the basis of social organization resemble very much what he called “the union of egoists”, playful groups of voluntary association. But the invocation of these concepts by the authors are also, on another level, not even wrong. What is considered sacred in a society is determined by the socialization of people in that society, which is ultimately determined by the outcome of the last crisis of social reproduction, the crisis which kicks off the social logic and which cannot in any way be reduced to what came before.
If spooks and a failure to rationally debate were really at the heart of our present malaise, then we must take our solution as a change in consciousness. Just as the greatest failures in psychoanalysis, quack scientists, religious cults and irrelevant sects have argued for centuries. What separates this book from such hippy-dippy nonsense is its intellectual rigor, but notably, such rigor is not necessarily in service of its larger claims. The authors are fond of quoting Marx when he says “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances…”.6 Marx understood this attitude by going through painstaking lengths to show the material tendencies, class interests, and relations of production that set the stage for all political action. This runs counter to the post-structuralist project which seeks to disrupt any conclusions about what the effect of material tendencies economic development might be.
Thus, while perhaps a series of brilliant interventions in anthropological and archeological discourses, the popular message of the book is ultimately not very useful. But Marxists shouldn’t be looking to books from anarchists or liberals as sources of easy answers, instead, they should be treated as sources of the raw materials of arguments, evidence and new ideas which can be repurposed towards our ends. The Dawn of Everything, and Graeber’s entire corpus, are rich in these raw materials and are forever indispensable as a result.
The illumination of the possibility of different worlds, whether through the traditions of festivals that invert social life, or the traditions of academic social critique, are evolutionary spandrels, byproducts of a more elaborate method of social reproduction which may nonetheless be repurposed in the future and take on a whole new, unexpected meaning, including through the creation of a whole new social order. As Marxists and materialists, our theoretical research is centered around a scientific project of understanding history and our present society in order to change it. To that end, there remains a kinship with those who wish to do the same, even if we judge them to be misguided.
- https://youtu.be/F0b8b_ykPQk
- Acemoglu, Daron, and James A Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books, Cop. Pages 19-28.
- Althusser, Louis. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87. Edited by Matheron François and Oliver Corpet. London: Verso. Pages 71-126.
- The Civil War in France (marxists.org)
- 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. VII (marxists.org)
- 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 (marxists.org)