Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 01:09:09 +0000
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Native American land claims


Lou Proyect is right: Godena is losing it. Got Heartfield's
chronic inability to fess up. Political dementia, confusedness, lax
thinking. Witters about social justice one day, Gonzalo the next.

Louis R Godena wrote:

>  the US was industrialized with the aid of large amounts of outside
> capital --unlike England, Japan and Russia (all three of these industrial
> revolutions involving particularly harsh and callous treatment of their
> "primitive" land dwellers)

Neither is true without qualification.
Primary accumulation depended on something else besides ferocious
exploitation of English proletarians. Maritime states 
with strong internal markets were the first capitalist 
powers. The reasons are clear. They make it impossible to support
the Heartfield thesis, which Godena has nailed to his totem pole.

England and Japan (despite Japan's 'closure') benefited from mercantile maritime
trade since late medieval times. Europe developed because North America was 
its (essentially English) province: a million colonists in New England,
more thoughout the Caribbean, when the population of England was still only
3m. As Blaut says ad infinitum, accumulation in English proto-capitalism was
not just pump-primed by New World plunder: it was the sugar,
tobacco, rice and grain trades, the highly-capitalised slave-operating 
plantations, as well as the flood of looted bullion, and
the low cost of all factors of rpoduction in the New World,
 which led to take-off. 

US and English capitalism developed in tandem and the 
process began long before the late 18th c. 
(as for Russia, any industrial capitalism there was centred 
on St Petersburg and British and French financed). 

If I understood Heartfield, the Indians were used by 
reactionary European ruling classes against progressive 
American capital. Truth is the Indians were victims when 
Colonists and the Mother Country fell out and victims when they
did not. All that changed was the rate of extermination.

The First Nations were *created* by European  patronage, 
as boundary-objects defining social exteriority, as political 
subjects of  exploitation, as exotica, Rousseauean noble savages, and
simultaneously liquidated by the fatal combination of germs, guns 
and steel. 

The negative features Lou Godena relishes -- ' the reactionary caste of
 war chieftans and medicine-men' - were artefacts of imperialism. That's
how satrapies were always confected, from Pontius Pilate to the 
British Raj's policy to the Moghul princes. Lou Proyect is right:
Godena's exaggerated and masochistic mea culpas on behalf
of the Indians are off-colour. 

No nation on earth did not succumb to collaborationism, appeasement, 
betrayal, fawning, political prostitution, when faced with the
unbearable pressure of colonial terror. The rabbis in the ghettoes 
collaborated with the Nazis and together they birthed Israel, a 
historical Frankenstein which cannot endure. But you cannot blame 
the Jews. Blame the Nazis, and the sloth of the wartime British 
and Americans.

No nations failed to display signs of cultural suicide when faced
with imperialist genocide, but few fought with such blinding courage and
determination, as the Indian Nations which Godena, an Indian, derides.

Better to celebrate their achievements and bow down before their 
greatness.

Louis R Godena wrote:

> What would have been the fate of the Indians under the stewardship of a
> socialist America?  To continue to retain proprietory rights to vast tracts
> of undeveloped land would have been unthinkable.

Yeah, Proyect is right, a lot of unfinished thinking here.  Why would
 a 'socialist America' be as territorially aggrandising as is the USA? 
What cultural or physical imperatives drive socialist expansionism? 
Godena the Stalinist has a few phrases about Stalinist aggression itching
on his lips. And  the 'stewardship' of small coloured nations 
by big white ones has nothing to do with any socialism except Hitler's. 

An awful lot of crap is talked of Russian chauvinism, but everywhere 
the Russians went in their great trek into the Siberian and Central Asian 
hinterlands, the orignial inhabitants still remain: Russians did not 
exterminate minority nations, and the Bolsheviks went to some trouble 
to give them national alphabets and other keys to ethnic survival, 
as well as subsidising them heroically. 
The 120+ minority nations in the ex-USSR do not live on 'reservations'. 

Louis R Godena wrote:

> A nation of Foxwoods
> casinos, massage parlors and brothels stretching up one coast and down
> another?  Or leaving the reactionary caste of war chieftans and medicine-men
> firmly in place to administer a "peaceful" transition to civilization,
> acting as it were as a nefarious appendage to the new capitalist order?
> What of those aspects of their culture that enslaved women, prisoners from
> rival tribes, or that precipitated violence against neighbors, etc.  

It is dishonest to blame the Indians for the casinos etc. 

When the Bolsheviks arrived in a Central Asia so benighted that 
the last king of Genghis Khan's Golden Horde was still hanging on 
in Tashkent, they gave them statehood, Soviets, ended polygamy and 
female slavery  (it's making a comeback), took away the veil, educated 
them in their  own languages, gave them electric power and industry -- 
it's vexing to the West how so many Central Asians still hanker for 
a return to Soviet times. The Bolsheviks showed how easy it is to 
solve problems under socialism which are endemic to capitalism, in 
fact the creation of capitalism in its endless reproduction of colonial 
slavery and the native mentality introjected into the minds of its victims. 

Now even Lou Godena produces slave-talk about 'social justice'.

There is no need to hark back to imagined arcadias if you've got socialism, 
but if you haven't then there may not be much else to cling onto, but tales 
round the campfire. If they celebrate  resistance then they should be told.

There is a lot of bullshit going around about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism: 
truth is more than half Mongol males lived in lamaseries, the women did the 
work, in pre-revolutionary Mongolia; syphilis afflicted two-thirds of the
population. In Soviet times a different Mongolia emerged. There was
education and opportunity. The lamaseries were closed. Now Hollywood is making
shite films about Tibet, the British Council is feverishly reopening the 
lamaseries in 'liberated' Mongolia. Meanwhile, giant North American, Japanese 
and European logging and ore corporations are digging up Mongolia's assets 
and carting them off. 

The nomadic Mongols, like  the Indians of the North American plains 
rode the steppes and still mostly live in yurts. The Mongol drunk, a legendary 
figure, helpless and incapable, has made a comeback too. US evangelists
are there with their blankets and tracts. IMF officials speak of 'social
justice'. Godena echoes the toxic refrain.

'Development' and cultural and physical genocide go together. To blame the victims
is wrong. I am not sure why Lou Godena has started off down that track, altho
in the case of Furedi and Heartfield the reason is obviously self-advancement.)

Louis R Godena wrote:

> The ideal solution would have been assimilation into a "democratic" society
> that first of all recognized tribal pecularities without becoming prisoner
> to them.

'Would have been'? This was never an actual historical option. 
The solution is still socialism. Nothing has changed. 
Analysis of Indian history, culture, the meaning of the Indian 
ethnos etc surely must rest ON THE FACTS OF 
IMPERIALIST GENOCIDE, BARBARITY AND PLUNDER because 
that is the reality which shaped and still shapes the colonial experience. 
Emancipation from the darker sides of ethnicity CAN ONLY COME THROUGH 
STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM which means as Proyect says, 
not sabotaging the revival of Indian nationhood.

Louis R Godena wrote:

> I suspect,
> too, that nearly every common ordinary person really craves personal freedom
> and autonomy and the opportunity to realize one's own potential in a
> peaceful and just society far more than the observance of decaying customs
> and the observance of morbid ceremonies.  Means and the rest of them are
> just as self-aggrandizing and reactionary as Farrakhan and provide their own
> vexing obstacle to the type of socialist justice you apparently espouse.
>

Bullshit.  Is this true in any sense? Is this true of North American Jewish 
culture and observance? Is it true of Islam, in America or anywhere else? 
Is it not the case that faced with the unbearable pressures and atomising 
nature of existence in capitalism, of the humiliation of its anomic so-
called 'public' spaces, of the emptiness it contrives to congeal within 
its spectacular displays, of the chauvinistic, triumphal and predatory 
nature of its pleasures, which take the form of one-time male-orgasmic 
fixes -- faced with this, people retreat into the
relative order and calm of religious and social observances, because there 
is simply nothing else that offers hospitality, warmth, solace and solidarity?
These 'morbid ceremonies' are some of the few life-enhancing opportunities
people have.

Lou Godena speaks of a 'just society', 'social justice', but these
have nothing to do with overthrowing capitalism. Despicable, crass cop-out.
Whenever  they are raised it is always as an appeasing, reformist alternative 
to Marxist-Leninism. The use of such phrases actually 
means  some personal or political accommodationis in view -- if not 
ala Means or Farrakhan (or LM or Gandhi, or...) then what, 
the American Labor Party? Where is Lou Godena's political terminus?

I seriously respect Lou Godena. But as Lenin said, 'judge a party by its
program' and on this reading Lou Godena's program stinks. 

Louis Proyect is right: the stance we take on the history of Native 
Americans has far-reaching political, not just academic significance. Lou 
Godena should not toy with these questions and should never allow himself
to be used a political screen for the likes of Living Marxism, whose apostasy
if nothing else shows just how continuing is the relevance of Marxism (you can
still make a career from betraying it).

Mark



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