On Apr 19, 2010, at 11:27 AM, Sean Andrews wrote:
> Also, I'd say that there is a real problem with saying this is
> conservative and then saying that is necessarily a bad thing. When
> people are interested in preserving a way of life precisely because it
> allows them to live I don't know how I can argue that them sloughing
> it off will inevitably produce more freedom. When an indigenous
> community sees what the introduction of capitalist social relations
> did for a neighboring indigenous community--i.e. turned them all into
> indebted, landless, workers--it is not "romantic anti-capitalism" it
> is resistance to the real, empirical effects of a fucked up system of
> exploitation--effects they have witnessed first hand. If the Sarayacu
> or the residents of the Intag valley in Ecuador want to resist the oil
> and mineral industries from destroying their way of life, I don't
> think my feelings of ickyness about their gender dynamics should
> figure at all into the moral or even political judgement about the
> rightness of their cause.
Of course not - they're right to resist. But their point of view isn't the same as the standing of someone in the first world - or someone like Vandana Shiva, with mostly a first world following - looking backward. All that business about rootedness in place has absolutely nothing to do with life in the richer countries today, and no better politics would be grounded in it. It's blinkered and stifling. How you gonna keep 'em on the farm when they've seen Paree?