First world prosperity

[Charles Brown]

I agree with James. Marshall Sahlins' _Stone
Age Economics_ argues that hunters,gatherers
and gardeners as in North America lived 
in the main in an original affluence, most of
the time life was not nasty, brutish and short.
In general, anthropology holds that there was
greater gender equality in indigenous North American
cultures. Though there was division of labor by
gender, there was equivalence of social
status  between the
genders, no male supremacy. Europeans 
brought no great advance in women's
rights to the continent. In fact, they
brought male supremacy along with
genocide, slavery, capitalism and
nuclear weapons. So, whatever
advantageous technologies they brought
came as a mixed blessing. And they
didn't "trade" it. The Europeans' "trade"
was not ancient reciprocity, but
ripoff.

Today's U.S. imperialism is still based on accumulation
of wealth that began in significant part with the ripoff of 
the indigenous people of this continent. It continues
still if only in the sense that having a place to
put all of this stuff is a use-value. Land is a use
value because everything has to sit somewhere.

 Today's U.S. imperialism abundance also depends
on booty moveable resources removed over past
decades and centuries as well.

Charles Brown

  Detroit

Workers of the West , it's our turn.


>>> James Devine <jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu> 08/26 5:00 PM >>>
Brad says: >You may not care that your wife doesn't spend her life
painfully processing acorns to make acorn mush, but I'm glad mine doesn't
have to...<

In my household, there's a 50 percent chance that I would be the one
running the acorn processor (rather than my wife doing it).

not that I'm holier than thou or anything...

More crucially, many anthropologists say that those groups working with
neolithic technology (with tribal rather than Aztec-type social relations)
had an abundance of leisure compared to us. The North American Indians seem
to have had this. Though of course they lacked in-door plumbing and
resistance to European diseases. 

Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html