T-Bone Slim, born on this day in 1880, was an IWW member, working class songwriter, and author. Due to his popular, labor themed tunes, Slim was dubbed the "laureate of the logging camps".
Born Matti Valentin Huhta to Finnish immigrant parents in Ashtabula, Ohio, Slim became an itinerant worker after leaving his wife and family in 1912. It isn't known when Slim became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but he first appeared in the IWW's press in the 1920 edition of the IWW Songbook.
Slim became one of the IWW's most famous writers during the 1920s and 30s, and many people would buy the "Industrial Worker" just to read his articles - one ad from the paper read "there's a lot more in Industrial Solidarity and Industrial Worker than T-Bone Slim's columns".
Slim did not presume his working-class readership to be unintelligent people, making use of complex wordplay and experimental writing techniques, playing with ambiguity, satire and surrealism.
Slim was also well-known for his songs, such as the "Lumberjack's Prayer", a parody of the Lord's Prayer about the poor quality of food available for the working class, and "The Popular Wobbly", which experienced a revival among civil rights activists during the 1960s.
In spite of his renown in radical circles during his lifetime, many details of Slim's life remain unclear. During the mid-1930s, he settled in New York City, where he worked as a barge captain on the docks.
In May 1942, Slim's body was found in the East River. His cause of death remains unknown and has been subject to speculation. Following his death, Slim largely faded into obscurity, especially compared to more famous IWW-associated writers such as Joe Hill.
Slim's songs have been preserved, however, re-published in editions of the Little Red Songbook and covered by musicians such as Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and his own great-grandnephew, John Westmoreland.
Until recently, there was thought to be no surviving photographs of Slim, however, in 2019 two photos were discovered and published by Working Class History in a Newberry Library collection.
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Its interesting thinking about this after having read Engle's The Origin of the Family private property and the state. There's a thing in there about primitive families where brothers share wives and all the kids are treated as all of their kids. The taking your brothers widow thing is just a throw back to that type of family.
I vaguely remember reading that in pre-enclosures Europe, people outside cities didn't really care much about who the parents of a child were; The whole community would cooperate in taking care of kids.
Please don't describe other cultures as "primitive". Anatomically modern humans have been around for half a million years. We've all been developing the whole time. "Primitiveness" is a comparison of a foreign culture to European culture that takes for granted that European culture is the norm. It's a hard habit to break, and there often isn't good language for it, but it's worth doing.
Levirate marriage, marrying your brothers widow, was partially about continuing the family line, but it was also very much a form of social support. In many of the times and places levirate marriage was practiced a widowed woman and her children would face poverty or death from privation. Levirate marriage partially prevented that. A similar example is Muhammad telling Muslims to marry the widows of dead Muslim soldiers so they wouldn't be destitute.
Afaik brothers marrying a single woman is a fairly rare practice only extent in a few cultures today, and only in some circumstances.
I mean primitive in the sense that the cultures evolved significantly beyond that and also in the sense that these cultures were preindustrial and preliterate. Like how a shaped stone is a primitive tool. In the second sense European cultures were primitive far more recently than Arab or African cultures so I don't see how using that term is Eurocentric.
I am putting on my Anthropologist hat. Abandon all hope. I hope this doesn't come off as too preachy. Anthropologists, the good ones at least, are trying to break down some of these notions like "primitiveness" that our discipline was responsible for spreading in service of Imperialism in the past. It's a whole thing for me because my discipline bears a lot of responsibility for spreading the idea in the first place.
We've all been evolving for exactly the same amount of time. Evolution doesn't have a destination or a goal. Guys living in highland Papua New Guinea have the same amount of cultural evolution, to the second, as guys living in, idk, Silicon Valley. Both cultures are continually adapting and changing in response to their environment, and since neither one has been wiped out they're both equally evolutionary fit.
Shaped stone was used up until about a decade ago because it wasn't possible to make a sharper surgical blade than a flaked obsidian blade. the technology has existed for tens of thousands of years, and it has been the apex of sharpness, the sharpest practical blade that it was possible to make, up until our lifetimes.
Tools aren't primitive or sophisticated. They're either suited to purpose, or they're not. Some are more or less efficient, but efficiency is a product of what complementary technologies are available, and what knowledge exists at the time. 2 million years ago we knew how to make achuleuan hand axes. Which aren't great, but it was the most sophisticated tool you could make with the technology and knowledge available at the time. They're still not great, but if you don't have other materials and equipment necessary to make a steel axe, and you don't have the the time to make a polished stone axe, the achulean hand axe still gets the job done. Europeans were still using stone tools in some contexts until fairly recently, like the last hundredish years before industrialization recently, because in an unindustrialized economy there are advantages to tools made from materials that don't need, say, an entire iron bloomery and sophisticated manufacturing equipment to produce. Breaking a steel blade might be a big problem, so you use a stone tool that is more suitable for the task in light of the economy considerations around damaging a stone tool vs damaging a steel tool. We still use stone for all kinds of manufacturing processes - A stone maul used by some craftspeople hasn't changed much in thousands of years. Mauls made from other materials are available, but often aren't better than stone. We still use stone in all kinds of manufacture that require durable, high density materials.
The stones for the pyramids were cut using abrasives fixed to string with adhesives, conceptually similar to how we stick very hard abrasives together with adhesives to make cutting implements that can cut very hard surfaces. It wasn't primitive, or unsophisticated. "Primitive", no matter how well intention your meaning, carries the entire weight of European colonialism, the explicit statement that other technologies are the result of an inferior sort of man, a less intelligent, less spiritually pure, less physically fit sort of man than a European. For primitivness to exist it must stand in contrast to sophistication, to progress, to high technology, and in every case European technologies and cultures are the sophistication against which primitiveness is measured, always in bad faith, always to justify the violent domination of the primitive other culture and other people that the Europeans needed to invent to justify their violence. If the guys building the pyramids had access to more efficient stone cutting equipment they would have used that. They didn't use abrasive saws and hand drills because they were primitive, they used them because they were sophisticated, because they were the best technology available that could be manufactured locally and was fit for task.
Primitiveness isn't simply a comparison of the relative efficiency of tools. It's a value judgement, a condemnation of another way of living that explicitly elevates the cultural perspective from which you are passing judgement. In the modern day it's almost always the perspective of the Imperialist European culture which is being used as the perspective from which to judge. Other cultures are more or less primitive based on how closely they conform to European norms. And when it is Europeans being called primitive it is still, explicitly, a statement made to subvert the assumption of European superiority.
This isn't just pedantry. There is a lot of internalized imperialism and European violence that comes with dividing the world in to primitive and sophisticated people. It can lead to really bad, reactionary thinking, like believing that the world prior to European imperialism was an idyllic golden age, instead of just another time with it's own real and serious problems. Different problems, but real problems. It leads to a belief in progress, to the idea that things naturally progress from bad circumstances to good circumstances. The example I always bring out is that the Achamaenid Persians, who under Cyrus tried to conquer the Greek Hellenes, didn't practice slavery. They would hold prisoners of war for forced labor for a fixed period, but other than that they didn't have a recognizable institution of slavery. 2,500 years ago, when bronze and iron were still extremely expensive and wood and stone tools were in wide use. When literacy was relatively limited, when industry as we would recognize it was confined to a small number of large cities. The Hellenic Greeks are help up as the ancestors of the sophisticated European cultures since they practiced a very limited form of democracy where the men of their wretched little city states held franchise while women and slaves did not. Meanwhile, the Achamaenids were managing a massive empire with a postal system and no slavery. But because the Achamaenid's are foreign, oriental, asian, other, and the Hellenes, no matter how ridiculous the comparison is on it's merits, are "Europeans", the Hellenes get to be sophisticated and tghe Achamaenid's are primitive.
There might come a time, soon, as the world industrial economy breaks down under the weight of global warming, that various kinds of stone tools become practical and desirable again. It's not likely, since once you know how to make steel it's a fairly straightforward process you can do in your back yard if you have a source of iron ore, but in the absence of a global economy there are places that don't have ready access to iron ore. Is it primitive to use a stone tool when steel isn't available? If the choice is between stone tools and no tools, should stone be judged as primitive, inferior, less than?
So, in sum; Calling something primitive carries an inherent judgement, and in the 21st century, as the world is still in the grip of or reeling from European Imperialism, that judgement is a European judgement made for the benefit of European imperialist culture. Breaking the idea of primitiveness can be a tool in helping to break imperialism by allowing someone to evaluate other cultures and their practices outside of the lens of European norms. For instance; afaik, cultures where brothers marry one woman are often cultures where the ratio of men to women is skewed for some reason, or where the economic situation was very harsh and one of the brothers was likely to die, leaving his children fatherless in a time where that was economically important. Engels may have thought it primitive for wahtever 19th century brainworms reason, but it's usually a response to the material circumstances of people's lives, like anything else.
Okay anthropology hat off thank you for attending my lecture I'm going to go back to shitposting about owls now.
Also; If you ever want to break your brain sit down with an anthropologists and ask them to explain all the incredibly different ways that different cultures reckon who is and who isn't a member of their family, and how they map out those relationships. Some of them are so, so different from European norms that I was never really able to keep track of them, even with charts.