File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 206


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



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