Socialdem. 21st Century

An interesting Google talk by Ian Hodder on the origins of sedentary communities in the Neolithic Near East:[embedded content]

From the 10–17 May 1908, the Socialist Party of America held a national convention in Chicago.It was at this conference that the convention set up a special committee of five men to study the issue of mass immigration into the US, namely, Victor L. Berger, Guy E. Miller, John Spargo, Joshua Wanhope and Ernest Untermann (Untermann is well known as the first American translator of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital).On the 14 May 1908, the convention passed this resolution on mass immigration, which...

In part 1 here, the debate within the Socialist Party of America on mass immigration at their national convention in Chicago from 15–21 May 1910 was examined.In 1912, the Socialist Party of America held another national convention from 12–18 May in Indianapolis.Once again, the issue of mass immigration was discussed, and once again the committee on the immigration question produced a majority report.Remarkably, the majority report of 1912 was even more opposed to mass immigration than that...

The Socialist Party of America existed between the 29th July 1901 and the 31st December 1972. Before the party was repressed for its opposition to World War I and suffered splits over the question of Communist Russia, it was probably the most successful and largest radical party of the socialist Left in America, at least down to the 1920s.The Socialist Party of America was made up of Marxists, anarchists, some members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, democratic socialists...

There is a brief reference to it in a pamphlet by Karl Marx called “On the Lausanne Congress” published in July 1867: “The power of the human individual has disappeared before the power of capital, in the factory the worker is now nothing but a cog in the machine. In order to recover his individuality, the worker has had to unite together with others and create associations to defend his wages and his life. Until today these associations had remained purely local, while the power of capital,...

Below is a great documentary on the Natufians and the origins of agriculture, right down until the spread of farming into Europe from c. 6,500–4,000 BC as Neolithic Anatolian farmers migrated into Europe.One problem is that this documentary takes the older view that the Younger Dryas (c. 10,800–9,500 BC) drove the Natufians to adopt agriculture proper as a survival strategy. Today, however, many scholars see the Natufians of the Younger Dryas as in a transitional stage that was only moving...

The Natufians were a people in the prehistoric Levant from c. 12,500 to 9,500 BC who developed sedentary or semi-sedentary settlements to exploit wild cereals, and experimented in the early domestication of plants. Their descendants then eventually adopted the first agriculture after the Younger Dryas (c. 10,800–9,500 BC).It is possible that the phenomenon of “plant nurturing” (deliberate actions to increase the reproduction and spread of plants for food) was practised by Pleistocene...

Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published in 1798. An influential revised edition followed in 1803, and a sixth edition in 1826. In this work, Malthus mulled over the population, social and economic trends that we now call Malthusianism.Charles Darwin was driven to one of his most important insights into biological evolution by reading Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1838 in the sixth edition, during a terrible depression in...

I have made this chronology to complement my summaries of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009).It covers both human evolutionary prehistory and early history:4 million years ago – emergence of the Australopithecus genus in eastern Africa2.8–1.5 million years ago – time of Homo habilis2.6–1.7 million years ago – Oldowan culture, the earliest stone tool archaeological industry of prehistory, in Africa, South Asia,...

Chapter 1 of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007) is called “The Sixteen-Page Economic History of the World,” which briefly summaries the broad, long-run economic history of humanity.Gregory Clark contends that the most important long-run, historical reality of world history can be summed up in two ideas: (1) from the earliest times of hunter-gatherers until roughly 1800 humanity was stuck in a long-run Malthusian trap: per capita wealth may have...