(10-29-2012, 10:51 PM)FireIceTalon Wrote: So there were markets, money, a State, and classes during the holocene? Is this what you are saying? If so, do you have evidence to support this?
What I am saying is that we have very little evidence about social organization during this period, and what little we have gathered was certainly not available to Marx nor Engels nor anyone else of their era.
It is, of course, the positive factual claim that requires substantiation. Russell's Teapot and all that.
Were one to simply ignore the problem of evidence, however, the next roadblock is fairly obvious: A band of 50 kin in a resource-abundant land might well be able to function in a non-hierarchical, non-commercial form of life. How on earth does one scale that up to even 500 people, let alone 7 billion? People start killing each other right around the 100 mark, which is why we see so little evidence of groups larger than bands without hierarchical political organization.
-Jester