Re: Foster responds

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Lou says:

> 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.

The point for Marxists, however, is that even if capitalism produced
a net gain empirically for the working class, compared to what had
existed before, it would still have to be superceded by socialism in
order to accomplish universal social emancipation of humanity.  We
are not conservatives who prefer the pre-capitalist past to the
capitalist present; we examine the capitalist present critically from
the point of view of what can be accomplished in a socialist future
based upon the potential objectively inherent in the present but
blocked by social relations of capitalism.

Yoshie