I found your ideas, about tribal business, from Beyond Civilization interesting, but the food is still under lock and key. How do tribal businesses remove the food from lock and key?

I live in Nicaragua, and I would say that 50% of the people here belong to tribal businesses exactly as you describe them. Still, a few rich manage to maintain strict hierarchy, and food under lock and key.

From the evidence here, it doesn´t seem that purely tribal business “works”(domination system evolves to suck it in). It also occurs to me that this idea of tribal business has forgotten many other aspects which made tribes “work.”

I nowhere said that the proposals I was making in Beyond Civilization would solve all the world’s problems (in fact, I specifically said they wouldn’t).

Starting a tribal business has everything to do with escaping from wage slavery, nothing whatever to do with removing food from under lock and key. If 50% of the businesses in Nicaragua are tribal, I find it difficult to understand how they don’t work. If they don’t work, why are they there? If they don’t work, then there should be no tribal businesses there.

Obviously tribal businesses lack many of the best features of the aboriginal tribe. They weren’t conceived as an improvement on the aboriginal tribe but as an alternative to wage slavery. An artificial heart isn’t as good as a real heart—but it’s better than being dead. In the same way, a tribal business isn’t as good as a real tribe, but it’s better than wage slavery.

Besides, the proposals I made in Beyond Civilization were offered not as endpoints but as starting points. It’s better to take a small step in the right direction than to take no step at all.

ID: 583
posted:
updated: 02 Sep 2002