>The unlikely question of whether the north American tribes or the
>Zemstvos represent missed opportunity is surely a laughably academic one
>- unless of course Proyect is suggesting that we go back to that stage,
>before going forward again to socialism: the most extreme version of the
>theory of 'stages of development' one could imagine.
>
>Fraternally
>
>--
>James Heartfield
Actually my interest in these questions precedes and transcends
Heartfield's Marxist-tinged libertarian intervention on the Internet. They
were provoked by a Conference on Globalization at the Riverside Church
several years ago which featured Jerry Mander, Kirkpatrick Sale and Vandana
Shiva as keynote speakers. They all advocated bioregionalism with American
Indians, Quakers, subsistence farmers, etc. as models. All 3 keynote
speakers were deeply hostile to technology and Sale has defended the
Unabomber recently. In his public lectures, he starts off by smashing a
personal computer.
I challenged Sale in the discussion period at this conference. I said that
it is one thing to defend the people living in the Amazon rainforest--and
unlike LM, we should--but it is another thing to tell the millions of
people living in the 'favelas' of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo to go live
there themselves. That is the logic of Sale's position and it is demented.
I hadn't thought much about these questions until Heartfield showed up on
the Marxism-Thaxis mailing-list and began defending some really nutty
positions in highly polished prose filled with quotes from Marx. What's up
with that, I said to myself. So I browsed through his group's archives and
discovered an obnoxious attack on Survival International. This human rights
group had come to the defense of the Yanomami people who were facing
genocide. Now Heartfield is too clever to come out and say that the
Yanomami should just disappear, it is much more Machiavellian to simply
heap abuse on the front-line defenders of the South American Indians.
My plans are to put a stake through the heart of this "productivist"
version of Marxism that could permit apologetics on behalf of genocide. It
is not just Heartfield's gang. The American RCP had a debate with Russell
Means and Ward Churchill at the Pine Ridge reservation that is contained in
Churchill's collection "Marxism and Native Americans" that Robin Hahnel
referred to. It makes all the same arguments but with a Maoist rather than
a left-libertarian inflection.
This is the 150th anniversery of the Communist Manifesto. Mike Albert's
attack on the Manifesto has been circulating on the Internet and is the
subject of an intense debate on Marxism-International between Doug Henwood
and Chris Warren, a dogmatist from Australia. The irony is that Doug is
calling for an end to dogma and an engagement with feminism and other
issues that Marxism has historically not engaged with successfully while he
still shows signs of adhering to his own "productivist" understanding of
Marxism. Doug stubbornly defends Judith Butler's pomo feminism while openly
reviling Vandana Shiva. In essence, however, both Butler and Shiva are
making critiques of Marxism's that reject the very unidimensionality that
all of us--except Heartfield--find so repugnant.
Old intellectual habits are hard to break. Marx was even older than
me--believe it or not--when he came to the conclusion that the Russian
populists were right and that he was wrong. In the Second Edition of
Capital, he had derided them. After reading them with an open mind, he
turned around and said that the accumulation model of V. 1 of Capital was
not universal. It's too bad that he wasn't immortal, isn't it. He could be
called upon to arbitrate all these disputes. Well, he may have died but it
is incumbent upon us--or at least those of us who consider ourselves
Marxist--to follow his example. Never stop criticizing our own ideas, never
stop looking at the material conditions of life, never stop identifying
with the oppressed.
In my postings on the American Indians, I plan to try to come up with a
synthesis of the critique advanced by the "indigenists" and Marxism itself.
As I have already stated, my guidelines will be the work of Marx on the
Russian questions and Mariategui on the Peruvian class/indigenous peoples
struggles. This is the agenda:
1) Wounded Knee: how the struggle to re-ratify an 1868 treaty shook
American capitalism
2) Russell Means, Ward Churchill versus Maoist dogmatism
3) American Indians and energy reserves
4) American Indians and ecology
5) A critique of Jerry Mander
6) Mariategui's Marxism
7) A Communist Manifesto for the next millenium
Louis Proyect
