Meszaros, progress

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>And really this dismissive cave-dweller-line reminds me of nothing so much
>as those routinely heard from free-market ideologues or indoctrinated
>college sophomores.  You know the song: they start out with some confident
>and vast claim about "human nature," you cite easy counter-examples from
>the vast canvas of societies that have actually existed and =wham= their
>only response is, "Oh, so you want us to all go back to living like
>medieval artisans/Trobriand Islanders/[_fill in blank from anywhere/time_]
>now do you??"  It's amazing: _they_ start with the generalizations about
>humanity (which happen to dovetail with capitalist ethos), you point out
>concrete ways that history doesn't support their generalizations, and
>suddenly you've become the romantic utopian.
<snip>
>Is it such a mental strain to separate such a basic point, that
>historically most human societies have not been motivated by the values
>that motivate bourgeois societies, from the equally incontrovertable fact
>that yes, history has happened? that colonization, plantation-slavery,
>enclosure-systems, vagrancy-laws, sweat-shop labor, state-capitalism (the
>only kind) and industrializatrion--that all of it's happened? and that in
>light of this history of the last few centuries nobody should now have to
>die of malaria or starvation, but neither should people be forced to
>sign-on to bourgeois myths and behaviors in order to be entitled to this?
>Isn't moving towards a world where that's possible what being on the left
>is about?  What am I missing here?
>
>perplexed,
>Maureen

I once again wish to express my agreement with you here, but your point has
not been understood by those who think of us as primitivists, because they
make great ideological leaps in a bad Hegelian view of history (without
realizing that's what they are doing).  In their minds, what happened =
what was necessary = what must now be morally rationalized.  At each step,
they make, without any arguments, equivalents out of non-equivalents,
ending up (or starting) with an idea that history has been so ordained for
the express purpose of producing what we are.  Here is another reason why
the denial of contingency deforms a 'dialectical thinking' into an
anachronistic reading of telos into the past from the vantage point of the
present.

Yoshie