>This seems correct -- but it also seems to indicate the irrelevance or
>even obscurantist nature of long arguments about whether some other
>people are/were happier in Situation A rather than Situation B.
>
>Carrol
You don't seem to get it. This is not about a "Golden Age". It is whether
radicals should defend the right of peasants to live in conditions that
people like Walt Rostow or others view as "primitive". Marxism has tended
to err on the side of Rostow. If you look at "Marxism and Social Democracy:
The Revisionist Debate 1896-1898", edited and translated by H. and J.M.
Tudor, you will discover that Edward Bernstein cited the Communist
Manifesto in support of colonialism in Morocco. Between the rude
"tribalism" of the Moroccans and the "civilizing" role of the Europeans,
Bernstein aligned himself with the latter. Citing slavery and pasha
despotism, he claimed that "modern democratic institutions" were necessary.
You got the same kind of arguments from the now-defunct LM magazine in
Great Britain which viewed resistance to the Narmada dam in India or
efforts to defend the Yanomami in the Amazon as reactionary. It is what
Williams characterized in the following terms:
"They were also, and more critically, the brisk metropolitan progressives,
many of them supposedly internationalists and socialists, whose contempt
for rural societies was matched only by their confidence in an urban
industrial future which they were about in one way or
another—modernisation, the white heat of technology, revolution—to convert
into socialism."
This is not Marxism, it is Walt Rostow/Menshevism.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
