Fido wrote:

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This is not an unknown and abstract argurement for primitive society often put forward by reactionaries. 'Backwards to the future' is the motto which is consistent with those who deny objective truth such as the 'posties.' For example, one group who advance a similar argurement forward is the Taliban.

Sir the only revolutions that have hoped to change the future have done so by trying to recapture a mythic past. Look at the puritan revolt in England, or the French revolution. Even our revolution sought that mythic constitution. In fact, the past did produce a more moral and civic minded man. Never mind that it was out of necessity because the only way we will have similar society is out of necessity. And we must understand that societies have learned to live with want, but never with luxury. Wealth divides people, and it is right to seek a limit on that which divides people because no divsion is natural. The distance that separate one person from the next in no way divides them from their common humanity.

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The writer asserts "primitive societies" got the upper hand but what primitive societies? It was not the US red Indians nor the Australian aboriginals for the right wing governments carried out genocidal massacres in various forms to grab their land and stop any future claims. Nor the Incas. It was not in Africa either with tens of millions slaughtered since 1870 for colonial plunder including mineral resources, land, and the many millions of chattel slaves for the forceful export of cheap slave labor. Who they regarded as their colonial possessions. Then there are todays multi-nationals who exploit workers and treat them as modern slaves with no rights.

I don't guess I said they got the upper hand; and since technology wins wars many primitive people have been over run. One people against another, and the less strong and intelligent move on to push on some people less strong and intelligent still. The technology they had was social organization. They found ways of getting to a common goal, and of giving voice to it. They survived because their social organization supported unity and concerted action. All who cam within their power became part of the team, or so much meat. There was no conquest with slavery. But slaves have been the destruction of many societies, and slave takers with slaves. Easy wealth gives the wealthy a contempt for the poor. What that Greek said was true: You cannot strike a slave for fear of striking a fellow citizen. Its hard to tell the slaves from the citizens in this land too.

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Marx also mentioned: "The history of all hitherto existing society was a history of class struggle." AND "In a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, now hidden now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

I like Marx; and I have read The Capital. And I do believe he said something to the efect in that book that Capital was a relation. In fact, capital, and every form of economy is a form of relationship. Even slavery at its worst was democratic. There has always been a mutuality between every person in society directed toward common survival. How well the society serves that end, rather than how well it achieves justice, or some other moral reality is the answer to whether it will long survive. People go along with much so long as their primary interests are served. This is easier in a democracy, naturally. In every society people get the sense when they're ends are not being pursued, or when the ruling class is going mad and taking the society along. If law rules one day, it can be undercut the next if it does not deliver peace and justice. Everything is actually negotiable except survival. The forms people build like government, and religions, and economies have all got to deliver the goods for both master and slave.

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" If there were an objective truth to be found by searching, then it would have saved advanced societies which had most of the time to look for them." Here the writer uses an old reactionary trick where the real relations are inverted. You take out of the equation the filthy role the media owned by billionaires has played in creating climates of fear, superstition, lies and propaganda in keeping the old order going. For instance, all the lies told about the Iraqi war to steal the oil and bomb the Iraqis calling that "democratic." By the way one objective truth "is that the first casualty of war is the truth."

What media in the Age of Plato? These people were rich talking to the rich. They did not really have a sense of anthropology, or even their own pre history. We can say we know more today than they did. Plato, living in a money economy, where money was thought the equivalent of honor, had no honor, but did have money. And when you live in an honor society with an honor economy as even the most dishonorable societies are to an extent; then you cannot understand money economies, and the money economies can't understand you. When people change their forms of relationship, which is how people progress; they also change paradigms, and whether the paradigm shift precedes or follows the change of forms is irrelevant. Every form has its relationship, and every relationship has its form. Within the forms, people relate. The justice of their relationship we can only judge at a distance. The question all people in all form of relationship need ask is: does it work for me?