Re: Native American land rights

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis N Proyect wrote:

>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.

[...]

>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.

Lou, you're attributing a Heartfieldism to me that wasn't anywhere in what
I posted, or what I think.

One of the passages I had in mind from Marx was this, which is not from the
Manifesto (what traces of the Manifesto did you find in what I wrote?), but
from Capital, vol. 1, chap. 31, "The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist":

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the
beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of
Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all
things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.
These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive
accumulation.... W. Howitt, a man who specializes in being a Christian,
says of the Christian colonial system, 'The barbarities and desperate
outrages of the so-called Christian race throughout every region of the
world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be
paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught,
and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of earth.' The
history of Dutch colonial administration - and Holland was the model
capitalist nation of the seventeenth century - 'is one of the most
extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, and meanness.' Nothing is
more characteristic than their system of stealing men in Celebes, in order
to get slaves for Java. Man-stealers were trained for this purpose....
'Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi,
a province of Java, numbered over 80,000 inhabitants in 1750 and only
18,000 in 1811.' That is peaceful commerce!.... The treasures captured
outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back
to the mother-country and were turned into capital there.... In fact the
veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified
slavery of the New World as its pedestal."

A description of primitive accumulation that sounds a lot like our modern
system of neo-primitive accumulation.

Doug