[A-List] A polemic with William Mandel

[Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxx>]

William Mandel and I have been discussing the same Northern Arctic topic, when
I tripped over what I realized was a headspace that many of us on the radical
left still embrace: old notions of progress.

I append a recent post I made to Rad Green in the course of that debate here,
in order to spark more discussion.

> Before modern medicine, developed out of all the things that comprise
> industrial society, reached First Nations, their average life span was
> 40-45. They have gained a quarter century of life from modernity.

> William Mandel

I have a lot of respect for
you and your amassed contributions over the years, most notably against the
HUAC, so I'll not jump to conclusions about what I think you just said. Yet, I
have not held back in this polemic for it is too important, but do not think I
hate you-- quite the opposite. You are a treasured comrade, but these kinds of
politics make me shudder in 2003.

Let me ask for some clarification here on the above:

Are you saying that the people who have had more than 95% of their people
WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH have "benefitted" from being "dragged
begrudgingly into the modern era"? That's Rudyard Kipling yap. Your 'quarter
century of life', well get back to me when it has really happened and I'll
show you how the colonizers grip was broken in the meantime, because First
Nations are all still facing immedaite extinction.

Traditional medicines that were, in many cases, far more efficient than any of
the current drugs-- derived from chemicals and other industrial poisons-- have
been systematically driven out of reality. Why? They didn't have a patent,
weren't 'scientific' enough, and consequently had to be wiped out, much like
trying to wipe out competition (cultural competition is the most dangerous
form), the ruthlessness of capital in yet another form.

By the way, until only twenty years ago, the life-expectancy for First Nations
was in the 30's. As it is, it has barely reached the low fifties, twenty years
the junior of the populations (like you and me) that displaced them. No,
"modernity" has annihilated First Nations, and 'modernity' must be resisted.
Your definition of modernity carries a burden.

What you are peddling here is awfully close to the 'stages' crap that some
'marxists' still spew, "Natives have to go through hunter gatherer, then
feudal, capitalist and finally socialist modes of existence before there will
be any progress towards communism". All of this ilk has to be resisted and it
is no wonder that, smartly, such 'marxism' has never actually gained a
foothold in indigenous attempts to survive or organize. Today, as the
remaining nations resist (but still do not surrender) the colonization *still
under way*, it is 'modern' fisheries, 'progress' in the mining companies, and
'new' drilling techniques that are continuing to exterminate and ravage they
and their lands. The fact is, that First Nations know that they are intimately
linked to the land and cannot be seperated from it in this 'modern' fashion
you propose. It is as alien a concept as private property; but you would be
choked if someone asked you to get a breathing license even though you know
that you cannot own the air.

Removing human beings from the earth and getting them to tame it is much like
asking a fish to find ways to 'improve' the water in which they swim-- all
such tinkering will kill you as surely as you proceed with such an experiment.

When you said people are part of the environment, you were exactly right. And
if I am supposed to attack the USSR for doing what it had to do to survive in
the early years of her existence, encircled by the imperialist states and bent
on her destruction through starvation, I will not do that any more than I
denounce Cuba today. But I will, as must you and especially the whole
anti-capitalist movement, learn from the tragedies that 'modernity' have
brought us to the brink of, the USSR included. To say that we are the
environment means to finally understand that we are not juxtaposed to nature,
not in competition with it, not trying to conquer or tame or reshape or
enslave it like so many resources that have no value beyond us, but in fact to
realize (as the inuit you referred to earlier did with their diets) that
everything you need, all life, is right around you; to fight and attack
mosquitoes is to attack a sign of life, and to attack life is the ultimate in
self-hatred, to be unable to recognize your own place as a special part-- only
a part-- of the balance on this earth. You and I are both life, we can
co-exist with the planet or we can try to tame it and change it, but as Fred
Engels said: "But let us not flatter ourselves overmuch for our human
victories over nature. For every such victory it takes its revenge on us."

We are starting to see this. No, we cannot 'conquer' nature, that is the
'brilliant' science of yesterday, much like atheism, it was useful in dealing
a blow to the idiotic superstitious nonsense it ran up against. But what you
propose is not only wrong, in the case of the planet it is suicidal, in the
case of the First Nations, it is genocidal.

Industrial society, especially under certain forms of 'Marxism', has posed
itself as a force of history, inevitable and with blessings for all. Any
society that takes on that attitude, run by George Bush or run by 'Communists'
is a very dangerous one. The headspace is that they are not looking at an
ideology, but rather a historical process, a list of truths elevated above
those who invented or 'discovered' them. Or, put another way, it allows for a
society that justifies destroying all in its path in order that 'progress'
might be made, and does so with no regard to the cultures lost, the peoples
displanted, and without even realizing that it is an ideological process and
not simply a 'mode of production'. These 'laws' once implemented, then become
the most insidious form of artificial supremacy, though not speaking of the
racial clan, it now is to speak of the cultural genocide by not calling it a
matter of culture, it is a life of destroying all resistance to it and
perversely calling that an act of creation.

This is what destroyed not only the herds of Buffalo and much of the European
landscape, but is also what my friend and co-moderator Usman was getting at in
his article "Weapons of Mass Assimilation"
http://left.ru/inter/2003/oct/majeed.htm , but it permeates not just
imperialism, but the offshoots of the revolutionary movement. It has destroyed
Africa. It will now attempt to kill off the Northern American Arctic and we
should not look to the 'hidden benefits'. It is not simple capital
accumulation-- it is a process by which the very act of resistance is seen as
futile. Even Marx made errors.

Marxism is the most valuable tool there has ever been for the masses of the
people in their quest for their own liberation, but until all aspects of
society, particularly the notions of what does and doesn't constitute
progress, can come under Marx's "Ruthless Criticism of All that exists" there
will be only more tragedy. If the class struggle is the motive force of
history, a prospect I cannot doubt nor contradict, then we must, as the list
states, come up with a radical anti-capitalist environmentalism. This
destruction of what is left of indigenous cultures and the livable planet is
under assault from what some call neo-liberalism, some call it
anti-globalization but I call it the same old capitalism-- and capitalism,
since before the end of the First World War, has nothing progressive to offer
us left but to get off the stage of history-- or we must blow them off
ourselves. Modernity is a capitalist headspace.

The main advantages to the rising consciousness across the world of the last
few years is the absolute heightening and refiguring of notions of
self-determination to the roofs of analysis. In this comes the inevitable
crash with how contesting for state power inevitably loses such
self-determination models along the way. No one has any answers, not yet
anyhow, but industrialisation, the expansion of the industrial working class
and models that were more than correct for the era of the second half of the
nineteenth century are to come under question, or else we are all doomed. If
imperialism is indeed the highest stage of capitalism, then it is capitalism's
death that will come when we attack all forms of imperialism everywhere,
ideological, and in the case of countries like Venezuela and heroic Cuba or
even Malaysia, it will be for self-determination that we must struggle.

Self-determination and sovereignty for First Nations, all peoples and
particularly those fighting imperialism has become part of what we now
understand must be the next wave. How we are going to make that practical is
now our greatest and most daunting task.

It will not be through dragging those who are still able to represent even a
part of their remaining culture into a wholly Westernized version of
"modernity". I'd rather be backward than that kind of 'progressive'.

Macdonald

--
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
                            --Bertolt Brecht