Stampeding bison?

[Jim heartfield]

In message <CMM.0.90.0.914250235.kbevans at panix3.panix.com>, K. Bevans
<kbevans at panix.com> writes
>       It's strange to me that you vociferously reject a "stagist"
>concept of Marxism and then decry every society that's developed past
>primitive communism.  It's clear to me that the appealing nature of native
>American culture comes from it's primitive communist character.  Without
>metal tools and organized agriculture, what did these people have except
>nature and each other?  Their economy defined their culture as much or
>more than most cultures.  When the development of native American culture
>was arrested by European invasion, they had a stone age economy.  They
>used stone tools.  That means their capital resources were freely
>available to anyone willing to search for them.  How do you apply a
>culture formed under those economic conditions to our modern one?

Louis Proyect objects to this comment from Boddhisatva in another mail,
but everything B. says can be supported by these selections from the
great Latin American Marxist Mariategui, proponent of indigenism:

'Above all, capitalist civilisation has internationalised the life of
humanity and created material links among all peoples which establish an
inevitable solidarity among them. Internationalism is not merely an
ideal; it is a historical reality. Progress unifies and combines the
interests, ideas, customs and regimes of peoples.' (p4)

'These people are surprised that the most advanced ideas reach Peru, but
are not surprised at the arrival of the airplane, the ocean liner, the
wireless telegraph, and the radio - all the most advanced expressions of
Europe's material progress.' (p4)

'indigenismo is neither a literary speculation nor a romantic pastime.
Nor is it an indigenismo that, like many others, reduces itself to an
innocuous apologia for the Incan empire and its splendors. In place of a
Platonic love for the Incan past, the revolutionary indigenistas show an
active concrete soildarity with today's Indian.

        This indigenismo does not indulge in fantasies of utopian
restorations.' (p71)

'Western civilisation is neither as rotten or exhausted as Valcarel
supposes. Nor once it has acquired its experience and technique, and
ideas can Peru mystically renounce such valid and precious instruments
and return with bitter intransigence to its old agrarian myths.' (p84)

'Socialism presupposes a capitalist technique, science, and stage, and
cannot signify the least regression in the acquisition of the conquests
of modern civilisation.' (p92)

'The Indian was not conquered by an ethnically or qualitatively superior
race, but was conquered by its technology, which was far above the
technology of the aboriginal peoples.' (p99)

'The Indian is in no way inferior to the mestizo in his abilities to
assimilate progressive techniques of modern production.' (p98)

'Spanish feudalism superimposed itself over indigenous agrarianism
respecting its communitarian forms. But this very adaptation created a
static order, an economic system whose factors of stagnation were the
best guarantee of indigenous servitude. Capitalist industry breaks this
equilibrium, interrupts this stagnation,c reating new productive forces
and new relations of production.' (p100)

'The greatest accusation against the republic's ruling class is that it
has been able to formulate but not speed the process of the colonial
economy into a capitalist economy.' (100)

All quotes from The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism, Jose
Carlos Mariategui, Humanities Press, NJ, 1996

-- 
Jim heartfield