There's certainly a lot of ire for people like the Deep Ecology movement in the latest book on the New Economy that takes basically this tack. And, though I'm not necessarily drawing a parallel, there is a passage in Lenin's "Capitalist Development in Russia" that
<Blockquote> In particular, speaking of the transformation brought about by the factory in the conditions of life of the population, it must be stated that the drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive. It is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions, and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions of labour, etc.; but endeavours completely to ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utopian. By destroying the patriarchal isolation of these categories of the population who formerly never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic, family relationships, by drawing them into direct participation in social production, large-scale machine industry stimulates their development and increases their independence, in other words, creates conditions of life that are incomparably superior to the patriarchal immobility of pre-capitalist relations. <end blockquote>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dcr8vii/vii8xii.htm
> How - and why - do you think our socities evolved out of
> hunter-gatherer mode? The way you tell it makes it sound like utopia
> which strikes me as odd. I would suggest that the very fact that
> society evolved at all indicates
I think Miles has been pretty clear that he's not advocating we go back there, just that the values we have today are not transhistorical and we could likely get by with a lot less crap so why say that if any other country is going to be developed, they should emulate us (you know, long working hours for increasingly less pay, unsustainable building and agricultural practices, and we could name plenty of others.) In short, it might be possible,
>
> > Again, I'm not saying this to claim that we should "go back" to
> > hunting and gathering societies. I'm trying to stress that what we consider to
> > be a "universal good"--life in industrial society--is in fact a
> > moral/ethical standard produced by people living in certain social conditions.
>
> I'm sorry but this is taking post-modernism much too far - though, I
> admit, taking it out of American and French universities was too far
> for me. Universal good does not belong in quotation marks. To write
> off progress as some kind of cultural illusion, or false consciousness
> if you like, is frankly further than I am willing to engage in a
> debate. I had a startlingly similar conversation with someone a few
> weeks ago.
well it is hardly a post-modernist idea. if anything it is coeval with modernism and has a basic root in Marx's critique of neo-classical economics which, in ideological arguments like the one we're all engaging in here, and makes it seem like challenging any part of western civilization mean chucking the whole enchilada (e.g. giving workers more rights, creating more energy efficient methods of development, or wondering if perhaps the poor don't necessarily have to always be with us.) The flipside being that moving in any direction towards an alternative will inevitably result in the collapse or the triumph of the forces of totalitarianism or fascism. In short, by preventing the more fundamental questions simply because it seems like such common sense, it makes it all the more likely that no questions of any importance will get asked at all. This is hardly the same as saying that we should give it all up and go back to being hunter and gatherers.
On the other hand, there seems to be at least a small ethical question in the claim that, if we accept our own civilization as the pinnacle of development, that everything we have is inevitably an advance on their civilization and that anyone living in a "less developed" state should welcome our assistance in destroying their culture wholesale, helping them migrate to the cities to live in the slums and teaching them how to be good entrepreneurs in the increasingly informal market for their surplus labor (cf: Mike Davis recent work, cited earlier in the week by Yoshi.)
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