Re: Re: Re: Foster responds

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine:
>"conclusive evidence"? in science, and especially social science, there's
>no such thing.

So does this mean that the agrarian origins of capitalism in 15th century
Great Britain is also up for grabs?

>There must have been something profoundly wrong with Mayan civilization
>(and its agricultural/water system) if a mere climate change -- an external
>shock -- led to its utter collapse. But some people on pen-l seem to have
>been portraying Mayan civilization as lacking any internal contradictions
>(unlike other class systems, it seems -- or didn't the Mayan system have
>classes?).

Somehow the original strand in this discussion got lost. Of course, Mayan
society was a class society. Of course there were internal contradictions.
What is at issue is the notion of "romanticism" of pre-Columbia society.
People like Michael Parenti argue that colonialism produced a net loss for
the Guatemalan Mayans. So would be the case of Aztec Mexico and Incan Peru
by all the evidence I've seen. This tends to go against the accepted wisdom
of Kautskyist "stages" that in my opinion never died out on the left, even
though it no longer exists in quite the same format. That's the substance
of my criticism of Hardt-Negri, that they are defenders of colonialism on
the basis that every advance of capitalism is an improvement over what
preceded it, especially the sort of "village idiocy" framework that
pre-Columbian societies are often cast in.

Louis Proyect
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