Re: Re: Tom Kruse's world: was [the mita]

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Someone whom I respected a great deal asked me earlier today what all of this
>discussion has to do with real world struggles.  Tom Kruse, in his note to
me,
>was describing the heroic struggles of the people of Bolivia.  Suppose one of
>these Bolivians were to stumble on to the list and ask how all of this
would be
>useful in the struggles at home.
>
>Michael Perelman

Actually I have had long conversations with these kinds of questions with
Tom in private email exchanges and over lunch at the West End Cafe in NYC,
even before I ran across Blaut. Tom is married to a Bolivian woman whose
interest in such questions is about as keen as you can get. One book that
she insisted that he read and take to heart if they were to remain married
was June Nash's "We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us," which is about the
tin miners of modern-day Bolivia, whom Nash regarded as proletarians even
though they still lived in communal villages as Indians. Here is a sample
of Nash's approach from an 1981 article "Ethnographic Aspects of the World
Capitalist System":

---
Wallerstein was not the first to perceive the operations of a world system
in the sixteenth century. Historians such as Eric Williams sketched the
outline of the system as European powers competed for and consolidated
economic advantages in the 16th an 17th centuries. Dodgshon gives credit to
at least 6 precursors, the most important of whom is A.G. Frank... Worseley
stated the dimensions of the system a decade before the publication of
Wallerstein's first volume:

"Europe had accomplished a transformation which created the world as a
social system. It was a world-order founded by conquest and maintained by
force. The New 'World' was no egalitarian 'family of nations'; it was
essentially asymmetrical. At the one pole stood industrialized Europe, at
the other the disinherited. Paradoxically, the world had been divided in
the process of unification, divided into spheres of influence, and divided
into rich and poor."

Louis Proyect
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