File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 708


Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 10:00:56 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Ecology and the American Indian


Russell Pearson:
>and I believe that we can conduct a debate without resorting to insults.
>This is now my intention anyway.

Fine. As long as you refrain from invitations to "bugger off", I will treat
you with respect as well.

>Have you any thoughts on the forms of exchange such as the American
>Indian's 'wampum' or of  'kula'? A friend of mine Dave Murray, wrote a very
>interesting paper on the arrival of the mature money economy (to use
>Simmel's term) into a wampum based society. The main point he made was that
>in systems such as wampum, westerners cannot but help translating it into
>money and he cited numerous literary references to back this up.

This raises a more fundamental question and that is the appropriateness of
the Marxist paradigm--based as it is on a class analysis revolving around
the mode of production--to hunting and gathering societies. I don't believe
I posted my article on "Russell Means, the RCP (American Maoists, not
Heartfield's outfit) and Baudrillard" here, but I will later today. I
didn't go into it in the article, but Baudrillard attacks Maurice Godelier,
the important French Marxist anthropologist influenced equally by
Levi-Strauss and Althusser, for trying to project a "mode of production"
structure on primitive societies. Godelier tries to find traces of such a
thing in all sorts of practices, including ritual sacrifice, but perhaps
Baudrillard has a point that these are merely projections of bourgeois
society into an arena where they have little relevance. Honestly, although
my political affiliations are more with Godelier than Baudrillard, this
question nags at me as well. At some point, I will have to study Marxist
anthropological literature in greater detail to see how this question is
confronted. Right now, my knowledge of the literature is limited to a
fairly specific area, and that is the relationship of hunter-gatherers to
nature.

>Your argument may be with me Louis, but don't you think that Harvery has a
>point (no anthropologist, but good Marxist that he is) that to accept
>American Indian ecological ideas either:
>
>"require belief in either some external spiritual guidance to ensure
>ecologically 'right' outcomes, or an extraordinary omniscience in
>indigenous or pre-capitalist judgments and practices in a dynamic field of
>action that is usually plagued by all manner of unintended consequences." ?

David Harvey is one of my favorite Marxists, who I always go out of my way
to hear lecture when he is in NYC. His theoreticization of the concept of
space seems essential for Marxism, since it helps us to understand how
capital solves crisis time and again. Trotskyists and other Marxists who
are in the "catastrophist" tradition of the early Comintern view capital's
crises strictly along temporal lines. Thus, the discussion always turns
around the question "Is it 1929 yet?" Harvey argues that this is the wrong
question. It should rather be, "*Where* will capital move to now that East
Asia is kaput? Latin America? Africa? Russia?"

That being said, he has still not given adequate weight to the ecological
crisis as such. Crisis, in his view, is the familiar "first contradiction"
type crisis of unemployment and attacks on wages and working conditions. He
thinks that concerns about global warming, etc. are simply the same sort of
hysterical reaction to capitalism that has always been around. Capitalism
can resolve these problems, he says. The problem is that nobody is arguing
that they can't be resolved on capitalism's terms. I am reminded of how
absurd this approach can be during the battle I was conducting with 7 LM
members and their 5 Trotskyite sympathizers on the APST newsgroup. I stated
that the pig-farms of North Carolina were making the rivers and lakes
completely undrinkable, as well as killing all the fish and making
recreation impossible. One of the Trotskyites, a fan of the dead pedophile
Gerry Healy, said that the capitalist (or socialist) answer might be to put
bottled water in every home. If this is the only sort of "resolution" that
we can offer, then we should close shop. As soon as I am finished with this
American Indian thread, I will take a close look at Harvey's latest book
and have lots more to say.

>
>I have a serious question here Louis: can we adopt American Indian ideas
>without their magical component and why should we trust their epistemology?

This weekend I will post a critique of Jerry Mander's "Absence of the
Sacred" and will answer this question in plenty of detail. Mander argues
that Indians should shun computers and other high technology, especially
when it comes to resource measurement. I will attack this stupid notion and
defend technology and science, as did my colleague Meera Nanda in her
struggle with Vandana Shiva.

Louis Proyect



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