>My problem with Shiva is her gender essentialism, her romanticism about
>India's pre-colonial past, her hypocrisy in leading a very cosmopolitan
>life while recommending that everyone else stay at home, and a very
>un-nuanced rejection of technology. Just because Monsanto is using biotech
>to screw peasants around the world doesn't mean that biotech itself is
>always and everywhere a sinister plot by white imperialist men.
>
>Doug
There is just as much--if not more--that can be learned from Vandana Shiva,
Jerry Mander and Kirkpatrick Sale as can be learned from Judith Butler.
Like it or not, these people are a corrective to the "rural idiocy" thesis
that is contained in the Communist Manifesto and that you have alluded to
many times favorably.
This is what Marx and Engels say:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has
created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as
compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the
population from the idiocy of rural life."
This must be rethought. It has tended to distort our perception of the
population shifts from Chiapas or Puebla, for example, to Mexico City. Do
we believe that there is something "idiotic" about the way that Chiapas
Indians live? Is this what Marx and Engels were saying?
Mander, Shiva and Sale have taken a close look at how such peoples live and
come to the conclusion that the city is much more idiotic. I kind of go
along with them. Where I part company is in the belief that the answer is
some kind of Khmer Rouge reverse population shift.
I will have much more to say about this in a few weeks, but this "rural
idiocy" thesis has to be confronted and purged from our vocabulary. The
ecological crisis of the 21st century is a product of exactly those
demographic shifts that Marx and Engels were celebrating. Resolution of the
crisis will have to be found in "rural wisdom" itself. People who depend
upon and live close to nature have a much better perception of the types of
measures that are needed. People like Rigobertu Menchu and American Indian
shamans have to be listened to.
The value-system of communalist peoples is much closer to the communist
value system that we seek. The problem is the transition to the material
conditions which will allow such a revolution in values to take place.
Shiva, Mander and Sale have no concept of such a transition. Mostly what
they propose is utopian retreat from the class struggle.
My thoughts on these questions are still not as clear as I'd like them to
be, but after reading Mander carefully, I suspect they will be.
Louis Proyect
