The Tragedy of Progress: Marxism, Modernity and the
Aboriginal Question
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
About eight years ago, I began writing about the
contradictions between Marxism and indigenous movements with an eye toward
resolving them on a higher level. These investigations were provoked by
articles that had appeared in Living Marxism (LM), the magazine of the
Revolutionary Communist Party in
I found one LM article particularly provocative. It argued that human rights groups defending the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon rainforest were hindering their social and economic development by seeking to keep them preserved as if in amber, like museum displays. This attack was related to their attacks on an environmental movement also seen as hindering "progress." For the RCP, progress meant widespread adoption of nuclear energy, DDT, genetically modified foods, etc. Nowadays, this group--with the exception of Heartfield--has dropped all pretenses to socialism, but still pushes heavily for its "modernization" agenda through its latest public face, <http://www.spiked-online.com/>.
For example, this snippet from an article on the Bolivian
struggle encapsulates their attitude toward indigenous forms of struggle:
However, some of those
lining up with today's Bolivian protests are not just disillusioned with
politics at home - they've never really tried it. People who might skirt around
their local estate because it's too rough will nonetheless happily march
alongside Bolivian peasants in opposition to US policy. Theirs is a middle-class anti-Westernism, a
suspicion of big business and big development. It's a fantasy of return to a
simpler, cleaner life, away from the mess of burgers and MTV. The call to
'restore the Inca nation' strikes a chord.
full: <http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CABEC.htm>
There is so much that is wrong with this that I wouldn't
know where to start. So I will just say that it is indistinguishable from the
garbage you get from Thomas Friedman columns and leave it at that.
Until recently, I found very few people on the left who were
trying to reconcile Marxism and indigenous struggles. Three of them, all
Indian, became members of the Marxism list: Hunter Gray (nee John Salter, a
contributor to the Cochranite American Socialist
magazine in the 1950s whose article I had stumbled across in the course of
archiving the magazine), Roland Chrisjohn and my good
friend Jim Craven.
Very recently, I discovered another voice in the wilderness,
namely David Bedford, a Canadian professor whose "The Tragedy of Progress:
Marxism, Modernity and the Aboriginal Question" (co-authored with
In an email from David, I learned about how he was led down
this road. He was a member of the Canadian affiliate of the Spartacist
League whose experiences in the class struggle forced him to question many of
his previous assumptions:
My own interest in
Aboriginal struggle came from my wife's experiences. She is a doctor who in
1990 was practicing on the Mohawk reserve on Khanawake.
This was the year of the Mohawk resistance to the Canadian state and she had
incredible experiences every day trying to get into the blockaded community to
see her patients... regularly running the gauntlet of city police, provincial
police, regular army units and racist crowds. The article and book stemmed from
discussions with comrades on the issues of the future of aboriginal
communities, their role in socialist transformation and more theoretical issues
of stages, progress, nationalism, and development. Needless to say I did not
always agree with my comrades.
The introduction of "The Tragedy of Progress" is
titled "Aboriginal Crisis and the Silence of the Left." It documents
the indifference of the organized labor movement and socialist groups to the
assault on native struggles over fishing, hunting and land claims, including
the one at Khanawake that involved preventing the
extension of a golf course. Developers sought to cut down a pine forest that
was sacred to the Mohawks. This had followed years of encroachment on Indian
land. All across this hemisphere, such struggles are taking place continuously,
including
Chapter one is titled "The Continuing Conquest."
It identifies the mode of production that prevailed in pre-conquest American
Indian society and draws upon the work of anthropologist Eleanor Leacock. I can't recommend Leacock
highly enough. Here is some background on her from the woman anthropologist
pages at the
After graduating from
college in 1944, Leacock sought to work with Ruth
Benedict in
For her dissertation, Leacock asserted that family hunting territories,
individually owned and inherited tracts of land, were
not aboriginal among the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi), the subarctic
Indian people of
full: <http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/leacock.htm>
In chapter two, titled "Aboriginal Genocide and the
Left," the authors conduct a survey of the Canadian left including the
NDP, the CP and various Trotskyist groups. All are found lacking to one extent
or another. Basically, they are all plagued by "stagist"
conceptions which posit a kind of Hegelian necessity for precapitalist
societies to be replaced by capitalism. Capitalism then creates the material
basis for socialism, whose arrival will remedy past injustices against the
Indian. No wonder people like Ward Churchill are hostile to Marxism with such a
point of view prevailing. I was particularly pleased to see a sharp criticism
of George Novack's 1992 pamphlet "Genocide Against the Indian" there. I too find this work replete
with stagist conceptions that would be repugnant to
American Indians, whose traditional ways are seen as a kind of obstacle to
capitalist progress. I commented on a defense of Novack's
schema that had appeared in the Militant newspaper last year:
"Novack explains the historically progressive spread of
capitalist social relations from coast to coast in the United States, while at
the same time condemning the brutal extermination of the Native American
population by which this was accomplished. There is a difference between
sweeping away precapitalist encumbrances such as
tribalism, and a genocidal war, which is what the capitalists ended up carrying
out for reasons described by Novack. Similarly,
explaining that slavery needed to be swept away does not mean one is calling
for killing all the slaves." [Quoting from the Militant]
There is so much
confusion in this reply that one hardly knows where to begin. First of
all, the American capitalists were not interested in wiping out
"tribalism", whatever that is. Their goal was removing Indians from
the land they legally owned. To somehow conflate this with the historic goals
of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is a stretch at best. One of the most
brutal attacks on the Indian people took place in the Southeast, where small
and free Cherokee landowners were driven from their land in order to exploit it
for cotton production based on a latifundia model. If
this is supposed to have something in common with Tom Paine or the
Enlightenment, I cannot discern what it is.
More to the point,
there is an implicit notion in Novack's schema that
capitalism is more productive than previous systems. "Encumbrances"
such as tribalism had to be removed in order for civilization to move forward.
This kind of undialectical view characterizes the Kautskyism of the Second International. In truth, the
American Indian made far more productive use of nature than the capitalist
ranchers and farmers who replaced them. The capitalist mode of production could
certainly produce more goods with less labor, but at a terrible cost to the
long-term viability of the land. If anything, the socialist world of the future
will have to re-institute many of the ways that indigenous peoples related to
the environment.
full: <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2004-January/003199.html>
Chapter three is titled "Aboriginal Apprehensions of
Marxism." It is a survey of critiques of the kind of stagism
found in Novack from both Marxists influenced by
postmodernist thought or the
"Post-Marxist" thought will tend to have more of
an affinity for indigenous issues as it tends to question "grand
historical narratives" of the sort found in schemas such as Kautsky's writings. As one example, the authors cite David Barsh, whose 1988 article "Contemporary Marxist Theory
and Native American Reality" argues that Marxism and liberalism share
certain assumptions about "progress":
Marxism itself [like
liberalism] is a logical development from the rise of scientific and
technological rationalism at the end of the 18th century. People used science
to conquer nature, and Marxism now proposes to use science to overcome the
constraints in human society that (in theory) hold back the further progress of
conquering nature.
This leads him to conclude:
In the final analysis,
the problem of industrialism dwarfs
the Left-Right debate as Indian leaders have long maintained. Large-scale
technocratic industry concentrates power, alienates workers, unleashes
ecological irresponsibility, and increases States' capacity for suicidal
warfare without regard to whether production is controlled by corporate or
State bureaucracies.
This obviously has an affinity for ideas put forward by
Russell Means, a close ally of Ward Churchill, in an article titled "The
Same Old Song" presented at a Black Hills Survival Gathering at Rapid
City, South Dakota in 1980 when both Indian and Marxist organizations submitted
papers. The Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) presented a paper titled
"Searching for a Second Harvest" that reeked of dogmatism and racism,
just as the sort found in the similarly named British group. Means argues:
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.
The parallels with Barsh are
striking. For both the post-Marxist and the indigenous activist, the primary
contradiction is between "the industrial system" and Indian
traditional ways.
In the final chapter titled "Marxism and the Aboriginal
Question" and a postscript titled "Prospects for the Future," the
authors put forward some tentative suggestions on how Marxism and native
struggles can be reconciled. They are rooted in a critical reading of works
such as Marx's Ethnological Notebooks and Engels's
"Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State." These works
are imbued with a "tragic sense" of how a democratic and egalitarian
society was superseded by private property and "civilization".
Although Marx and Engels saw the rise of capitalism as being based on iron
historical laws, they did not worship at its altar as the British RCP did.
Referring to the Iroquois constitution, Engels writes:
And a wonderful
constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity!
No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or
judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All
quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by
the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes
among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge
threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a
civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization…And what
men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all
white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal
dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians.
full: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm>
But despite the noble character of these people, they were
inevitably to fall victim to the relentless march of history. As Engels puts it
in the same passage, "Let us not forget that this organization was doomed
to extinction."
Moving forward in the history of Marxist thought, Bedford
and Irving seek to resolve the contradictions between Marxism and the
indigenous through a fresh reading of Lenin's writings on the national
question. They believe that the following citation lends itself to a defense of
struggles such as the kind that the Mohawk nation
fought:
Insofar as the
bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in
every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour,
for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But
insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois
nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of
the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on
the part of the oppressed nation.
full: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch04.htm>
I just want to conclude with a couple of suggestions to
David and Danielle for further research.
First, I would strongly recommend Teodor
Shanin's "Late Marx", which is published by
Monthly Review press. It is a study of his relationship to the Russian populist
movement that demonstrates a clear move away from earlier writings, especially
on India, that betray a certain weakness on the question of the inevitability of
capitalist progress. Marx specifically tells the Russians that his economic
writings were not meant as some kind of prescription for how society must
evolve. By taking his stand with the precapitalist
rural commune, Marx showed that he was not a captive of Hegelian type schemas
about progress.
I would also strongly recommend the writings of José Carlos Mariátegui, the father of Peruvian communism. My analysis
of the importance of Mariátegui in resolving the
contradictions between Marxism and indigenous struggles can be found at:
<http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/mariategui.htm>\
You can also find an online archive some of his writings at:
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/>
This page contains a link to his 1928 article, "The
Problem of the Indian" at:
<http://www.ilstu.edu/class/hist127/docs/jcmindio.html>
I will conclude with an excerpt from this article:
The assumption that
the Indian problem is ethnic is sustained by the most outmoded repertory of
imperialist ideas. The concept of inferior races was useful to the white man's West for purposes of expansion and conquest. To expect that
the Indian will be emancipated through a steady crossing of the aboriginal race
with white immigrants is an anti-sociological naiveté that could only occur to
the primitive mentality of an importer of merino sheep. The people of Asia, who
are in no way superior to the Indians, have not needed any transfusion of
European blood in order to assimilate the most dynamic and creative aspects of
Western culture. The degeneration of the Peruvian Indian is a cheap invention
of sophists who serve feudal interests.