Re: Marxism and Native Americans

[James Heartfield <James@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Whatever attitude we today might want to take towards the rights of
indigenous peoples, it is difficult to find a case for them within the
writings of Marx and Engels (whose attitude seems at times close to
genocidal).

Some examples:

'Just as each century has its own Nature, so it produces its own
primitives.'

The Philosophical Manifesto of the South German Historical School of
Law, p 61
---



the reproduction of presupposed social relations - more or less
naturally arisen or historic as well, but become traditional - of the
individual to his commune, together with a specific objective existence
predetermined for the individual, of his relations both to the
conditions of labour and to his co-workers, fellow tribesmen, etc - are
the foundations of development, which is therefore from teh outset
restricted ... The individuals may appear great. But thre can b no
conception here of a free and full development either of the individual
or of the society, since such development stands in contradiction to the
original relation.
Grundrisse p487 Penguin 1973



'[Primitive communism was an] 'abstract negation of the entire world of
culture and civilisation, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of
the poor unrefined man who has no needs and who has not even reached the
stage of private property, let alone gone beyond it.'
Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptsp346 Penguin 1975



'Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of
industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organisations
disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes,
and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form
of civilisation and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not
forget that those idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they
may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism,
that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible
compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it
beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical
energies.'

British Rule in India P 306. Marx changed his assessment of the positive
role of British Imperialism, but not of the restrictive character of
traditional communities.

'Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with
bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are
founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has
not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in
a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection.
They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive
power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore,
the social relations within the material life, between man and man, and
between man and Nature are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is
refelcted in the ancient worship of Nature...'

Capital, p84

And then there is this from Engels:

'There is no country in Europe that does not possess, in some remote
corner, one or more ruins of peoples, left over from an earlier
population, forced back and subjugated by the nation which later became
the repository of historical dvelopment. These remnants of a nation,
mercilessly crushd, as Hegel said, by the course of history, this
national refuse, is always the fanatical representative of the counter-
revolution and remains so until it is completely exterminated or de-
nationalised, as its whole existence is in itself a protest against a
great historical rvolution.

In Scotland, for example, the Gaels, supporters of the Stuarts from 1640
to 1745.

In France, the Bretons, supporters of the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800.

In Spain the Basques, supporters of Don Carlos.

In Austria the pan-Slav South Slavs...'

Revolutions of 1848, quoted in Engels and the Non-Historic Peoples,
Roman Rosdolsky, Critique Books 1987
--
James Heartfield