[Marxism] Marxism and primitive communism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I want to thank Scott Hamilton to calling my attention to a Jack 
Contrad article that appeared in the Weekly Worker. Titled "No Future 
in the Past," it presents an argument that basically recapitulates 
what Frank Furedi's RCP used to argue while it was still a nominally 
Marxist organization, namely that "primitive communism" was just as 
evil in its own way as capitalism, particularly with respect to the 
environment.

I have run into various expressions of this idea over the years both 
within and without Marxism. The most notable recent example is 
Shephard Krech's "The Ecological Indian" that holds North American 
Indians responsible for hunting the wooly mammoth to extinction, etc. 
The bourgeois media embraced Krech's findings eagerly since it was 
ammunition against land claims by native peoples in Canada and the 
USA. Any scholarly findings that could be used to make an amalgam 
between the conquered and the conqueror would help to undercut 
sympathy for indigenous peoples, as this review of Krech's book from 
the January 23, 2000 Toronto Sun would indicate:

"What political relevance in Canada is there in jettisoning the myth 
of the ecological Indian?

"First, it means Canadian Indians should not be accorded the superior 
sanction of high-minded environmentalism in negotiations of land 
settlements and their claims to the right to take game and fish where 
and when they choose. It should also mean much more balance in 
responding to native demands and needs simply because discussion of 
them no longer should be burdened with the guilt piled on the whites 
for devastating a noble people whose societies once lived - and might 
do so again - in perfect harmony with nature. Indians are neither 
more noble nor ignoble than other people - in their blood, or in 
their history."

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/09/10/marxism-and-primitive-communism/


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