When more than an hour passed in sepulchral silence, without any post to
the list on _any_ subject, I got paranoid and logged off for some time.
"What have I done?!" Coming back, it's a relief to see this from Louis.
[...............]
> These are big questions really. Rush Limbaugh has a field day with liberals
> who defend Indian rights. "Do you want to give the country back to the
> Indians?" And so what do Marxists say? Frankly, I don't think it would be a
> bad idea in some ways.
This was anticipated in the early Sixties, when estranged bourgeois kids
were living stoned in teepees. Of course there were no palpable politics
to make out of that, so the story went on to Chicago and the Pentagon,
but the pot was necessary to get the mind and senses in synch with the
living earth, and no one who did that number can possibly forget the
sensations and meanings it brought. This is the brief golden age that
tantalizes much of the American left in its little mouseholes of memory,
making the practical tasks seem absurdly beside the point.
The so-called Drug War and the Palmer Raids of the early '20s are truly
ideological brother-maggots under the skin!
[..........................]
> One of the areas I want to examine is Engels' attitude toward the Iroquois.
> I was at the Barnes and Noble in the neighborhood a little while ago
> looking through the Native American shelf. Jerry Mander's book
> "Disappearance of the Sacred" was there and I browsed through it. He, along
> with Vandana Shiva, are prominently identified with indigenous rights.
(I know that title differently, but maybe there's a new edition.) Mander,
who runs what's probably the only _pro bono_ advertising agency in the
world, is just totally out of sight. I've been recommending that book for
about 3 years and have yet to find another human who's read it, even online.
> [Mander] makes an interesting point. He says that Engels greatly admired the
> Iroquois political decision-making machinery and said that socialists could
> learn more from them than anybody else in the world.
No mystery there: it's the land-use and property issues, which would stymie
everyone else from the first moment of being raised.
> Also, Marx's ethnological notebooks, which are supposed to be published
> this year along with extensive commentary, apparently call for PRESERVATION
> of tribal societies against bourgeois encroachment. I would like to get an
> advance copy of this to review.
The problem posed by Means is not insurmountable. Marx the analyst should
be separated from Marx the strategist. Marx more or less subverted
himself in asserting that a stage of production/distribution would persist
(along with its associated superstructure) until all of its intrinsic
possibilities are played out. Where does that leave us but waiting for
the entire world to become a network of Mexico Cities surrounded by
automated cropland, and then waiting for the moon and Mars to be fully
worm-eaten by mining operations supporting domed conurbations, etc?
As long as an apple remains, capitalism will be there to bite into it,
and doctrinaire Marxists will be there as patient _de facto_ accomplices:
no wonder we invariably end up talking to ourselves and sometimes not even
that! To the world's disinherited indigenes this doctrinal path makes us
quite irrelevant at best; at worst we can't be distinguished from fascists.
Ah, but whenever I bring up these contradictions I feel like the chorus in
a Greek tragedy. I hope we can have some honest talk about all this;
talk that any proletarian fly on the wall can follow. Time for change!
valis
