[PEN-L:9696] Re: Re: Bill McKibben

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rod Hay wrote:
>
>Other than calling each other idiots, I can't figure out what this debate is
>about.

It is about the relevance of Marxism to precapitalist societies. I have
written a number of articles on the subject, which despite a setback with
an academic publisher, I am trying to whip into a book. The next
installment will be on the FARC and the U'wa, which will be posted here and
elsewhere in a couple of weeks. This is the very first thing I wrote on the
topic:

=====

Russell Means, the RCP and Jean Baudrillard

During the Pine Ridge reservation struggle, most US Marxists responded
positively. Their ideology might  have preempted such a response, but the
demand for justice spoke louder. Sometimes it is just as well if the  heart
overtakes the brain, especially when the brain is not functioning too well.
What if they had worked  through the "productivist" logic of Marxism
mercilessly? After all, if it was "progressive" to support the  liquidation
of primitive societies in the 18th and 19th centuries, what would make the
20th century different?

These issues finally came to a head at a Black Hills Survival Gathering at
Rapid City, South Dakota in 1980  when both Indian and Marxist
organizations submitted papers. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)
presented a paper titled "Searching for a Second Harvest" that reeked of
dogmatism and racism. A word or  two about this group might be in order.

The RCP was an offshoot of the SDS and at one time had thousands of
supporters. The SDS had split into 3  factions in 1969. The Maoist
Progressive Labor Party led one faction, the so-called Worker Student
Alliance.  It specialized in a patronizing, workerist "Serve the People"
attitude toward trade union and popular struggles.  Since Maoism was such a
popular current worldwide back then, the other wing of SDS felt the need to
 compete on the same terms. Those in the know called it waving the red book
against the red book. It was all  quite insane as those of us in our autumn
years can recall.

The anti-PLP wing--the so-called Revolutionary Youth Movement--was itself
divided. The left, as we all  know, has infinite talents for fragmentation
and the late 60s was a classic period for both rock-and-roll and  sectarian
splits. One wing, the RYM-1, was the infamous Weathermen. The other wing,
the RYM-2, was as  Maoist as the PLP faction but tended to view the
American working class as too conservative to win over to  socialism. Of
course, implicitly this meant white, male workers.

Now the RYM-1 group did have an orientation to the workers, but this
consisted mostly of spitting and  cursing at them for wearing short hair
and having caused the Vietnam war.

The RYM-2, believe it or not, also split. One splinter became known as the
Revolutionary Union. A  vainglorious loudmouth named Robert Avakian, who
represented himself as an American Mao Tse-tung, led  them. By 1980 at the
time of the Black Hills conference, the RU had already evolved into the RCP
with its  current odious persona. This is a combination of ultraleftism,
vulgar Marxism and cult worship of whichever  avatar of Mao they recognize
at the moment. Most recently this has been Chairman Gonzalo of the Shining
Path. Meanwhile Avakian worship never goes out of style.

Russell Means, a leader of the Wounded Knee occupation, presented a paper
titled "The Same Old Song." It  is a challenge to dogmatic Marxism and a
powerful one at that. He says:

"Now let's suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek
allies (we have). Let's suppose  further that were to take revolutionary
Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete
overthrow of the European capitalist order which has presented this threat
to our very existence. This would  seem to be a natural alliance for
American Indian people to make. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the
capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far
as it goes.

"But, as I've tried to point out, this 'truth' is very deceptive. Look
beneath the surface of revolutionary  Marxism and what do you find? A
commitment to reversing the industrial system which created the need of
white society for uranium? No. A commitment to guaranteeing the Lakota and
other American Indian peoples  real control over the land and resources
they have left? No, not unless the industrial process is to be reversed  as
part of their doctrine. A commitment to our rights, as peoples, to
maintaining our values and traditions?  No, as long as they need the
uranium within our land to feed the industrial system of the society, the
culture  of which the Marxists ARE STILL A PART."

Now for the purposes of my analysis of the Marxism/American Indian
problematic, I will not try to come to  grips with what this "industrial
process" really means. I will take Means at his word that a certain reading
of  Marxism would applaud the destruction of Indian culture and society. If
there is a clash between the railroads  and traditional society, the
railroads must triumph. After all, there are those Herald Tribune articles
that Marx  wrote on India in 1853 that made exactly the same point. How can
we disagree with Karl Marx, after all?  Onward railroads! Onward
telegraphs! Into the dustbin of history Hindu or Lakota villagers.

Instead of addressing Means' concerns, the RCP paper flails away at him for
being a counter-revolutionary  who strikes "noble savage" poses. By lumping
together communism with capitalism, Means is leading the  youth of America
astray. They also deride his "almost laughable appeals to quit fucking with
mother nature."  Like all dogmatic Marxists, they are eager to find support
in some chapter and verse of Marx that would lend  support for their views.
They go to the Grundrisse and dredge up the following:

"The individual and isolated hunter or fisherman, with whom Smith and
Ricardo begin, is one of the  unimaginative fantasies of eighteenth
-century romances a la Robinson Crusoe, which by no means express  merely a
reaction against overrefinement and a reversion to a misunderstood natural
life, as cultural historians  imagine..."

Since Means celebrates the historical American Indian way of life, which
did involve actual hunting and  fishing, the RCP lumps him with Daniel
DeFoe, Rousseau and other European myth-makers. They say,  "Means has in
fact adopted some of the insipid fantasies of the bourgeoisie and has
capitulated to them.  Further, the total backwardness of Means' adoption of
this mythical 'noble savage' stance leads to more than a  bit of hypocrisy
as he attempts to carry it through."

The RCP's paper concludes with what they consider devastating proof of the
backwardness of Means'  position. This is the phenomenon of the "second
harvest," to which the title of their paper refers. What  exactly is this?
A NY Times article from August 12, 1980 examining stone-age life in the
region now occupied  by the state of Nevada around 7,000 years ago would
explain it:

"In one of the middens (refuse heaps) the scientists found large deposits
of coprolites, desiccated human  feces. Since it seemed strange that the
ancient people would use a storage cave as a latrine, Dr. Thomas said, it
is possible that the feces were stored there for what archeologists call
the 'second harvest.' Other primitive  people were known to have save their
feces so that, in time of famine, they could extract undigested seeds  and
other products for food. Analysis of the coprolites showed that the heads
of cattails and other marsh  plants were a substantial part of the lakeside
people's diet."

Somebody from the RCP must have clipped this article and put in their files
for an occasion just like this.  What would be the perfect squelch against
"indigenists" who had the temerity to believe that their people  were
better off before capitalism? Of course, it would be irrefutable evidence
that they ate their own shit.  White people knew better. They flushed their
feces down the toilet after using toilet paper with no less than 3  wipes.

The conference organizers invited Dora-Lee Larson and Ward Churchill to
provide a rebuttal to the RCP,  which they did in the paper "The Same Old
Song in Refrain." (You can read the 3 papers in "Marxism and  Native
Americans," South End Press. Bill Tabb is the only Marxist contributor to
the volume and his essay is  somewhat lacking since it accepts the
"productivist" version of Marxism as legitimate. His tack is to apologize
for it rather than coming to terms with what the underlying project of
Marxism is really about: human  emancipation.)

Larson and Churchill dismiss the amalgam between Russell Means and
bourgeois romanticism. One finds  sufficient proof in his sweeping
rejection of all Western European ideology, from Adam Smith to Marx. The
notion that he would make an exception for DeFoe or Rousseau is laughable.
More to the point is the RCP's  failure to engage with Means' ideas on
their own terms. They are utterly incapable of placing his thoughts in  any
other context except their own. If the RCP is an offshoot of Enlightenment
thought mediated through  Hegel and Marx, how can we expect Means to find
his influences elsewhere? They say, "It is as if to the  Marxist-Leninist
mind non-European thought itself is an impossibility; any tradition of
thought alien to that of  Europe therefore remains opaque to the
polemicists of the RCP."

And what of the "second harvest"?

Larson and Churchill make some telling observations. First of all, they
point out that the bourgeois  anthropologist who the Times article cites
does not even claim that the "second harvest" was some sort of  universal
pattern of behavior. It was simply an observation about the behavior of a
particular people in a  particular time and place. The RCP did the
bourgeoisie one better. It was willing to extrapolate from one
archeological finding and use it as a paradigm for Indian behavior. The
racism of the capitalist class is not as  extreme as that of the Maoists.

Yet this "second harvest" phenomenon did not just occur in primitive tribes
7,000 years ago. Larson and  Churchill remind us that the same thing
happened during famines in the USSR when the rural populace  separated corn
seeds from horse dung as well as their own for survival purposes. It is
only Indian peoples  who are barbaric, not citizens of a Marxist state. The
only thing I would add to Larson and Churchill's rebuttal  is that Marx and
Engels never thought that history always moved onwards and upwards. There
are sections in  the Communist Manifesto that point out that capitalism can
thrust humanity backwards unless the workers  overthrow it.

It is easy to understand why American Indian activists would look elsewhere
besides Marxism for political and  intellectual support for their struggle.
Ward Churchill describes his own intellectual odyssey in the  introduction
to the book. A Creek/Cherokee, Churchill made the rounds of all the Marxist
groups, including  the outfit I belonged to at the time, the Trotskyist
SWP. He considered himself a prospective member at one  point. Thank
goodness, he didn't take leave of his senses and join the way I did.

Churchill does have kind words for Jean Baudrillard's "The Mirror of
Production." According to Churchill,  Baudrillard reaches many of the same
conclusions that he, Means and Deloria have reached. I want to explain  why
this is so.

Just to refresh people's memory on Baudrillard, he is a leading French
postmodernist thinker who has  achieved some notoriety in recent years for
two of his "interventions." On the eve of the Gulf War, he argued  that
television had made actual war superfluous. He predicted an unceasing
spectacle that would pit Saddam  Hussein against George Bush, where
television would be an electronic surrogate for combat. When actual war
broke out, he appeared a bit foolish. He enhanced his image as court jester
for the trend-setting media when  he made an appearance at a recent
academic conference on "Chance" held at Whiskey Pete's Casino and  Hotel in
Primm, Nevada. At the keynote session, he made a drunken appearance on a
casino stage with a  performance artist. This was perhaps the inspiration
for the recent movie "Leaving Las Vegas."

I overcame my prejudices and read "The Mirror of Production." I wanted to
find out what Ward Churchill  saw in him. It certainly is essential reading
for those of us who are trying to come to terms with the  "productivist"
version of Marxism. This evil spawn of Marxism has some credibility to this
day because of  certain formulations in the Communist Manifesto and
elsewhere. Baudrillard, at least in this work, is no  clown.

Baudrillard's makes his central argument in the first chapter, "The Concept
of Labor":

"Radical in its logical analysis of capital, Marxist theory nonetheless
maintains an anthropological consensus  with the options of Western
rationalism in its definitive form acquired in eighteenth century bourgeois
 thought. Science, technique, progress, history--in these words we have an
entire civilization that comprehends  itself as producing its own
development and takes its dialectical force toward completing humanity in
terms of  totality and happiness. Nor did Marx invent the concept of
genesis, development and finality. He changed  nothing basic: nothing
regarding the idea of man producing himself in his infinite determination,
and  continually surpassing himself toward his own end."

Baudrillard challenges this paradigm. Why should we assume that the
liberation of productive forces is  justifiable in itself? There is
absolutely no question that the Communist Manifesto and Volume One of
Capital are replete with such themes. At its worst, this logic permits Marx
to write the Herald Tribune articles  that are essentially apologia for
colonialism. What Baudrillard, of course, does not contend with are the
dialectical tensions in Marx and Engels' writings themselves that reflect
doubt on such a model of "progress."  By the late 1870s, as I have pointed
out repeatedly, Marx himself openly disavows this model. Unfortunately  he
did not write a long tome that spelled this out in detail. He died
inconveniently. Thus, it has been up to  Marxists to critique Marxism
itself. We have been successful to some extent. Lenin's writings,
especially on  the colonial question, are an explicit rejection of the
notion that modernity and capitalist expansion have  anything in common.

In the chapter "Historical Materialism and Primitive Societies,"
Baudrillard argues forcefully that Marxism  falls apart when it confronts
primitive societies. It tries to project a "mode of production" template
onto these  societies where it does not belong. Influenced by classical
political economy, Marxism tries to find an  economic linchpin where it
does not belong. Notions of productivity simply do not apply and yardsticks
 based on them lead to racist conclusions. This is the sort of argument
that would obviously appeal to an  American Indian activist or intellectual.

The problem with Baudrillard is that he blames this not just vulgarized
Marxism, but science itself for the  oppression of primitive peoples. In
this he is consistent with people like Bruce Robbins, who have added
nothing substantial beyond what Baudrillard already said with more
elegance. Baudrillard states:

"Western culture was the first to critically reflect upon itself (beginning
in the 18th century). But the effect of  this crisis was that it reflected
on itself also as a culture in the universal, and thus all other cultures
wee  entered in its museum as vestiges of its own image. It 'estheticized'
them, reinterpreted them on its own  model, and thus precluded the radical
interrogation of these 'different' cultures implied for it. The limits of
this culture 'critique' are clear: its reflection on itself leads only to
the universalization of its own principles. Its  own contradictions lead
it, as in the previous case, to the world-wide economic and political
imperialism of all  modern capitalist and socialist Western societies."

Put in plain words, Baudrillard is saying that by projecting our own
"productivist" political economy model on  precapitalist or presocialist
societies, we are depriving them of their uniqueness and setting them up
for  exploitation.

This is the problem with postmodernism when you get right down to it. It
can not make elementary  distinctions between ideas and activity. It is not
the ideas of Adam Smith or Karl Marx that oppressed the  Lakota or the
Hindu. It was rather the capitalist system itself, which operated on the
basis of profit. This  expansionary system forced itself to travel the
globe looking for peoples to enslave and resources to steal.  Expand or die
is its motto. People like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill do not cause
colonial oppression.  They simply reflected upon it and tried to provide an
intellectual rationale for the British ruling class. Karl  Marx emerged out
of this intellectual tradition and was the first to expose the true
relationship between ideas  and activity. It was the economic activity of
class society that served as a seedbed for ideas and not the other  way
around.

The polarization between vulgar Marxism of the RCP sort and Baudrillard's
postmodernism reflects the  failure of Marxism itself to come to terms with
its own failings. We have a responsibility to amplify the  ecological
dimensions of Marx and Engels in the manner of James O'Connor. We also have
a responsibility to  come to terms with how Marxism should regard the
seemingly mutually exclusive claims of precapitalist  societies and the
need to "revolutionize the means of production." This is obviously the
subject of these  articles. In my next post, I will address the topic of
American Indians and energy reserves. It should be clear  that Marxists
have a responsibility to defend the right of American Indians to defend
themselves from the  incursions of uranium mining companies. The stakes are
quite high, not only from the viewpoint of American  Indian survival but
from the broader perspective of ecology.




Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)