[Marxism] Pomeranz

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Louis Proyect



I don't buy the notion that Greco-Roman values explain the conquest of the
Americas. Remember how those voyages got started. They were trying to cut
out the middlemen in the Middle East. They sought a direct route to India
and China. Commercial imperatives drove exploration, not the Aeneid. Being
determines consciousness, not the other way around.

^^^^^

CB: Voyaging there to trade does not have to include staying there,
conquering and forming settler colonies. Exploration need not include
conquest and enslavement. The very difference we are discussing is that the
Chinese voyaged and traded , _but did not conquer and settle_.  Seeking a
direct trade route to India and China did not mandate CONQUERING, physically
usurping the entire Western Hemisphere ! Conquest and slavery are not
commercial imperatives - witness the Chinese traded , but did not conquer.
That usurpation is rooted in a conquest ideology ,which we can trace , in
the European case, to Greece and Rome.  The evidence of the tradition is in
the Aeneid, the historical legends of Alexander, Caesar, etc.  It very may
well be that the original Greek/Alexander conquering inclination was in
defensive response to conquest expeditions from Persia and the "Middle"
East. Afterall, the empires - Assyrian, etc.,- which grewup around the
Tigris-Euphrates were _the_ original state empires.

The being of commercial trade does not entail conquest and enslaving
consciousness. The consciousness of conquest and enslaving did not spring
from ,was not originated in the being of class struggles in the countryside
of England, France and Spain in the 1400's. The fact that a new form of
being, exploitation of wage-labor has been established, transformed from
lord-church/serf exploitation, does not cause the establishment of a
consciousness of conquest and settlement of populations to usurp land in
Africa , America and Asia.

This comes up with Guns, Germs and Steel , too. The being of having guns
doesn't necessarily entail a consciousness of using them to conquer people
and take their land.  Even infecting them with germs does not entail
necessarily taking advantage of their sickened state to steal their land.
Conquering them and taking their land only follows from an ideology to do
the same, along with the ability to do so because guns have just been
discovered.


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