Re: Native American land rights

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 22 Dec 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Or the old Marx school business, even, with poverty being produced
> alongside wealth.
>

I think Marx had 19th century England in mind when he developed his
analysis. Yes, capital accumulation had a double-edged character in
Western Europe. Does it in Bolivia, from where Tom Kruse posts? This is
the essential question after all. What is the difference between Bolivia
in 1997 and England of 1840? Will Bolivia launch a textile industry? Will
it build a navy that can protect its colonies? Unless the historical
context is established, we are not doing Marxism.


> What positive aspects? Antibiotics, mass literacy, births that don't kill
> mother or infant, air travel, Baudelaire, telephones, astrophysics. Stuff
> like that. But whatever you think of capitalist modernization, it's a fact
> of life, part of our social inheritance, those unchosen tools we make
> history with. So the question is what we do with them. What's the better
> use for antibiotics - so Frank Purdue can crowd chickens closer together,
> or so a sick kid in Nairobi doesn't have to die?
>

Nairobi is in Kenya. What has been the effect of capitalist property
relations in Kenya? Has it yielded the sort of results that Marx falsely
predicted would come to India in his Herald Tribune articles of 1853? Do
we tell Bolivia "no pain, no gain." Unless they submit to capitalist
transformation of the countryside, they won't grow up to be strong,
healthy adults like their cousins in Europe? Believe it or not, there are
some really intelligent people who believe this, like Jeffrey Sachs. Of
course, it's totally false.

Furthermore, antibiotics are a cheap fix for the problems of Kenya. What
good does it do to supply medicine to keep people alive in conditions of
*absolute poverty*? LM has used improved life expectancy figures based on
the availability of modern medicine to make the case for capitalism. (They
never use this word, they use the word "civilization". Such euphemisms are
common in bourgeois society where all class-based terms are verboten.)

What has been the effect of capitalism on Bolivia and Kenya? Has it
produced capitalist modernization? No, it hasn't and that's the problem.
Latin America, Africa and Asia will never experience capitalist
modernization and that is the reason revolutionary socialism has taken
roots in such places as China and Vietnam, where there was no industrial
proletariat to speak of.

I think it would be much more useful to discuss specific, concrete class
relations in places like Bolivia or Kenya over the past century than to
simply repeat mantras from the Communist Manifesto as Doug does.

Louis Proyect