Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 10:55:36 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: M-I: A pow-wow in the East Village I found the passage from Stephanie Koontz describing the meanness of 19th century Lakota society posted on the Marxism-International mailing-list most interesting. Stephanie was in the SWP around the same time as me, but I never got to know her that well. She was very close intellectually and politically to Evelyn Reed, the party's official "woman's liberation" theorist and anthropology expert. Evelyn was married to George Novack, who I got to know fairly well. In the process of accumulating material on the American Indian from the Columbia Library, I took a look at the essay written in 1949 by George in his "America's Revolutionary Heritage." It is appalling. It has the usual moralizing about how unfortunate it was for the Indians to get exterminated, but--after all--it was part of the historically necessary bourgeois revolution. When the workers overthrow the bourgeoisie, the accounts will be squared. It is just this kind of Hegelian nonsense that people like Stephanie and I were raised on. Stephanie makes the case that there was gender oppression and other forms of inequality in Lakota society as bourgeois society began to impinge on it more and more. Does this preclude the possibility that there is something resembling an Indian world-view that predates these social relations, and that is egalitarian and ecological on its own terms? It is as if someone argued about the value of socialism and was answered with the facts of the brutal history of the USSR. The ideal of socialism exists independently of the history of the USSR. Furthermore, we can even see traces of this ideal in the living history of the USSR, no matter how venal the behavior of the government. The resistance of the Soviet people in Stalingrad to Hitler rested on such beliefs, just as the Wounded Knee uprising rested on the beliefs of Crazy Horse and his ancestors. Socialism is defined in the speeches of such thinkers as Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg et al. The beliefs of American Indians are defined in their poems, songs, stories, prayers and art. They have an independent existence that sustains them no matter the particular fortunes of Indian peoples at a given moment in time. On Saturday night I went to a pow-wow put on by the Thunderbird Dance Company at the Theater for the New City on the lower east side. This space is usually devoted to Brecht plays, performance art, etc., but once a year this company takes it over. The proceeds go to a scholarship fund for needy American Indian youth. I went there expecting to see a bunch of left-wing Jews in the audience like myself, but was surprised to discover that at least half of it was American Indians. They made no effort to look Indian--no feathers or buckskin--but their features spoke loudly. I wondered what they did for a living? Where did they live? I suspect that many lived on Long Island and probably had the same kind of jobs as other working-class people. I also suspect that they had the same foibles as other working class people. The men beat their wives, the kids took drugs, they all watched too much television. Meanwhile, they had trekked over fifty miles into the lower east side of Manhattan to see other Indians perform songs and dances from a distant past that had no connection to their daily experience. What kind of nostalgia trip was this? And then it dawned on me. What difference is there between them and me? When I attend a Brecht Forum weekend conference on the Communist Manifesto, I am among people whose daily lives have nothing to do with socialism. We are nostalgic for a set of ideas and a way of life that appears all but dead. The Paris Commune only lasted a few months, but somehow it has the power to inspire people like myself long after the event has entered the dustbin of history. A Hopi story-teller spun out a tale of her people coming to a pow-wow and celebrating the old ways. The site of the pow-wow was a beautiful clearing where the grass was green and the flowers were in bloom. Her mother and father danced and they had a look of joy on their faces. Her final words were something to the effect that the pow-wow was just a dream, but it is a dream that will not go away. The dream of such peoples and our own dreams as Marxists--and I will use the word "dreams" just to steam a few people up--are dialectically related. The communalist vision of the Hopi, the Lakota, the Mayans, the Quechua, the Yanomami et al lacks a material base. Bourgeois society mitigates against it. Meanwhile our own communist vision is morally, spiritually and politically exhausted. We have failed to provide an alternative to capitalism, except on the basis of doing what they do better. From the pen of one of its most sophisticated thinkers--Leon Trotsky--we discover that capitalism is a "straight-jacket on the means of production" and socialism will remove it. What a telling analogy! A straight-jacket is used to restrain a violent, insane person. So the goal is to remove the straight-jacket? Is this the kind of system we desire? From Krushchev, one of our cruder thinkers, we get the promise that "we will bury you." In other words, we will do the same thing you do, but better. As it turns out, capitalism was equal to the task of out-producing the socialist countries. East Germany et al failed because their economies could not keep pace with the West. As it turns out, the best thing that these economies could have done was produce a modest standard of living for the entire population while raising their moral and spiritual level through goods that can not be priced, like free ballet, theater, parks, recreation, leisure, etc. In trying to work through this dialectic of the clash between precapitalist societies and Marxism, I find myself drifting back to the values I clung to long before I became a Marxist myself. The beat poets, especially Gary Snyder, were a big influence. I found their resistance to the consumerism of American society deeply attractive. I could never understand back in 1957 why automobile tail-fins had such an important role in our lives, when a rose could mean so much to someone like William Blake who hated the industrial revolution. Frankly, I am happy to draw a line between myself and those Marxists who would want to compete with the capitalist class on its own terms. I will continue to use Marx in the fashion he should be used, as a guide to understanding the dynamics of this sick system and as a way of mobilizing the class power to overthrow it. I will never lose track of the deeper beliefs that keep me going and that preceded my involvement with Marxism. They are found in the words of Gary Snyder's poem: FOR ALL Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes cold nose dripping singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel. I pledge allegiance I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetration for all. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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