[Marxism] In Search Of An Argument: Indians And The West

["Jeff Rubard" <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxx>]

> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 15:38:30 EDT
> From: RWRAINEY5@xxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Re: Help on Hitchens (or Ignatieff) on railroad
>       and     indian geno...
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Message-ID: <12e.3ef01eff.2da855b6@xxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> Didn't Marx (perhaps "celebrate" is too categorical a word) generally think
> that the settlement of the American West was a Good Thing?   I mean, 
> Amerindian
> societies were for the most part fairly brutish nomenclatures, weren't they?
>
> Rachel

To address the second question: No.  There is *literally* nothing to be said 
concerning
"Amerindian societies", as there was more social variation among pre-Columbian 
settlements
*than in the rest of the globe combined*: what I am saying is that Easter 
Island had more
to do with the Tsar than the Salish had to do with Tenochitlan.  This is a 
variation on a
theme announced by an Atlantic writer concerning the success of blacks in 
sports, and
the upshot is similar: there is *seriously* no trick to be turned concerning the
cultures of Native Americans, including uncritical admiration: in the US there 
is a
rough East-West division between "civilized" and "uncivilized" tribes, and much 
as
we have heard arguments in favor of the Iroquois influence on American 
government
(once very pronounced indeed, as a resident of Seneca, NY could tell you) 
precious
little evidence of the Western Indian's attitude towards life in the United 
States
has ever been produced.  The famed Boaz/Sapir/Whorf work on Hopi time-words is
quite misleading, as it suggests they were studying people without an adequate
*acquired* grasp of English for "tacking" in the social environment of the
pre-statehood Southwest; and generally speaking, such long-term "mappings" of
cultural particularity onto larger social formations are far from over and far
from irrelevant for understanding any aspect of society, including economic 
ones.

In terms of the first question: none of the old-European observers of American
expansion are famed for their accuracy, and there is a good enough reason for
this.  It is hard to tell them apart: your description more neatly fits Lenin,
as Marx was cheered by developments running more-or-less counter to the
social dynamic of Far-West settlement, where questions of various roads to
modernization were ruled more or less beside the point.  Marx did not live to
see the newspaper publisher who as a "left-labor galoot" rode herd over San 
Diego
in the teens, but such attempts to uproot socialist agitators through 
ambiguously
populist language were far from atypical prior to World War II: *pace* Adorno,
 the US west of the Continental Divide does not bear the mark of many a hand,
including those CIO unionists who repeatedly shut down Western port cities 
during
the '30s (those who have been told there has never been a general strike in the 
US
were lied to) and those miners standing in the way of easy money for friends
of the presidential administration.  In other words, one's attitude towards the
American West indicates the extent to which one truly subscribes to the 
principles
of Marxist economics (the relative uniformity of exploitation at any particular
level of econometric detail).

Rubard


--
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism