[PEN-L:764] Re: Re: Controlling sea-lanes and Apaches

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

     It wasn't just Trotsky and the Russian Social 
Democrats.  Marx himself at one point forecast that because 
of the weakness of the feudal holdover and at the cutting 
edge of world capitalism, it would be in the western parts 
of the United States that true socialism and an 
unencumbered proletariat would emerge.  
     This all seems slightly ridiculous today with western 
US cowboys being a bunch of individualistic pro-laissez 
faire types (or at least a lot of them).  But in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth century the West was a haven 
of many progressive ideas, movements, and impulses, from 
the IWW to such things as women's rights, suffrage first 
being introduced in now ultra-conservative Wyoming, and the 
first woman representative in Congress (Jeannette Rankin, 
1916, even prior to passage of national suffrage) being 
from Montana, now home of...  (oh, but militias are cool 
with a progressive potential, right?).
Barkley Rosser
On Fri, 30 Oct 1998 12:00:06 -0500 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> At 08:44 AM 10/30/98 -0800, you wrote:
> >Louis, did you write this piece yourself or are you quoting someone?
> 
> It is from the new book "1898" by David Traxel.
> >
> >two comments:
> >
> >it's implict in the essay but should be made explicit that the turning
> >outward of US (white male) ambitions was in some ways simply the
> >continuation of a trend: immediately after the US conquered the Indians, it
> >turned to conquering new areas. 
> 
> Yes, this of extreme importance. I doing research for my next article on
> Marxism and the American Indian that will focus on the question of how the
> United States should be viewed historically. There is a tendency to see
> imperialism as something that was introduced in the late 1800s and to
> elevate the pre-imperialist United States as some kind of model for
> countries with semifeudal trappings. For example, Trotsky wrote an article
> on the US which is included in the Deutscher collection that is almost
> rapturous in the way it looks at our "great democracy". The Russian social
> democracy was fascinated by the US as well and thought that one possible
> outcome for the Russian revolution against tsardom was an American-styled
> republic.
> 
> I will argue that something was rotten at the core of this republic from
> the inception. I am particularly interested in the whole question of
> Manifest Destiny, which foreshadows imperialism not only in its
> understanding that the US must expand outwards but in its racism as well.
> 
> This weekend I will scan in and post something from a fascinating book that
> compares the late 1800s wars against the Zulu and the Sioux.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]