>Ok, let me ascend from the gossip pages and put my point in plain English. >Simon Schama is a right-wing scholar in the pay of the ruling class. The >other people we've been talking about aren't. Your bringing in quotes by >and about Schama is irrelevant and can only be meant as a caricature of or >a slur against people you disagree with - either that, or you can't tell >the difference between people you disagree with. > >Doug Sigh. I am afraid you don't get it. There is no conspiracy afoot to promote right-wing ideas through bribery. "A right-wing scholar in the pay of the ruling class" is vulgar Marxism. I wish you would acquaint yourself with the more refined version before deploying the vulgar alternative. Hughes and Cronon have integrity, but so does Schama. Schama's decision to write a book making the exact same case as Hughes flows from an identical inspiration. They seek to show that the Greens are guilty of obscurantism. A wide variety of thinkers across the political spectrum love to do this, from Jim Heartfield, to you, to Ron Arnold to whoever. The favorite device is to show how the Mayans fouled their own nest, or the Native Americans stampeded bison off the cliffs. In fact, these ideas are commonplace here on PEN-L, as periodic eruptions from Barkley Rosser demonstrates. But the real issue is not what happened in precapitalist societies or even why. It is rather why it is imperative to respond to the catastrophe that capitalism is preparing. The ideological message of Hughes, Cronon and Schama is that these problems are eternal and, by implication, that it is a waste of time to change society, since it could very well be in the nature of mankind to despoil nature. I regard this as unconscious capitalist apologetics and maintain that it is critical to put forward the argument that Wood does, namely that there is something DISTINCTIVE about the capitalist system. M-C-M, that's what it is. We have to abolish this in order to create the objective possibilities for an ecologically aware society. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
