Jim Devine:
> In the Amazon,
>there have been tribes that have been characterized as "extremely nice" by
>outsiders (whites) just over a mountain or across a wide river from those
>characterized as "extremely fierce."
>
This muddies the discussion. We are not talking about head-hunting but
ecological despoliation. What does "nice" and "fierce" have to do with
killing nearly all the beaver in the Northeast during the 1700s? I just
heard the same crap about Indian savagery on the Spoons mail-list. I wish
if people wanted to find reasons to put Indians on the same moral plane as
the invaders who murdered them, that they'd at least come up with some
right-wing scholarly citations. I recommend Simon Schama, for example. In
his hatchet job on Kirkpatrick Sale, he did a good job documenting
head-hunting, cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice, etc. All Jim can muster
is a reference to "extremely fierce" tribes. Try harder next time, Jim.
>With the development of the classical empires (Aztecs, Egyptians, Romans,
>etc., etc.) a certain uniformity (or law, etc.) is imposed on the subject
>populations and the same time that improved transportation and
>communication (for the purpose of uniting the empire) encourages
homogeneity.
I love it how somebody can pontificate on entire civilizations in a
sentence. I should take this approach in future posts. It would save trips
to the library.
>
>With the development of the world market and capitalism as an accumulation
>machine, uniformity becomes the dominant theme to an extent that is
>qualitatively greater than for the classical empires. Most classical
>empires, for example, instituted pre-existing tribal organizations as part
>of the tributary organization, imposing collective responsibility of the
>tribe as a whole for the sins of the individual members (where of course
>"sin" is defined by those in power). This helped preserve the old tribes,
>in a distorted way. Something like this occurred with the bantustans in S.
>Africa, too.
What kind of malarkey is this? What in the world do bantustans have to do
with the relationship between stratified, agriculture-based societies like
the Mayans, Aztecs and Incans with hunter-gatherer tribes like the Jivaro
et al? Are the Incans to the Jivaro as the Boers are to the Zulus? Perhaps
Jim should strive for depth rather than breadth. His post is a million
miles wide and a quarter-inch deep.
>But with a fuller development of capitalism, the drive toward
>uniformity strengthens. Now English is on its way to becoming the world
>language (if it isn't already), while more and more of the subject states
>are subject to exactly the same cookie-cutter impositions of the IMF/World
>Bank, no matter what the local conditions are.
>
This is a concession to the crude understanding of the Communist Manifesto
that Wojtek expressed just yesterday. It really is pervasive on the left
and forms part of our conventional wisdom. Marxism, however, must be the
enemy of conventional wisdom if it is to do any good. There may be cultural
uniformity insofar as people watch Arnold Schwarzenegger videos or listen
to rap music. What is not on the agenda is economic uniformity.
>I think that it's correct that the world is moving in the direction where a
>capitalist is a capitalist, a capitalist country is a capitalist country,
>etc. and we can ignore variations. Even many or most of the imperial
>privileges that US workers were able to benefit from are disappearing as
>the US is becoming a dependent country like all the others.
>
And this is just so much nonsense, since it slips from "cultural"
uniformity to "economic" uniformity with no underlying analysis. A
capitalist country is a capitalist country? Is that all we need to know? If
Bolivia and Belgium are both capitalist countries, then the term is almost
useless as a form of political and economic analysis. The notion that
somehow the US is becoming "dependent" like genuinely dependent countries
like Bolivia or Mali is ludicrous.
>All of this is talking about _tendencies_, of course. The real world, as we
>know it right now, still involves tremendous amounts of variation that
>cannot be ignored. The people in the US are still relatively privileged,
>even if the privileges are fading.
>
The only tendency I see here is cliched thought.
Louis Proyect
