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NAFTA, Capitalism and Alternatives, V/2
This is the second of two messages with the same title.
> The story goes on! There is
> a sentimental myth leftists entertain that the Indians left to
> themselves
> had a culture that did not dispoil the earth, and capitalism and
> European technology ruined the environment.
Victor: Where is this myth? Who spouts it? I have never heard such a
myth. What I have heard, and read, are appreciations of the ways in
which and degrees to which a great many pre-capitalist practices (and
then more recently practices marginal to capitalism) worked with the
earth and not against it. How some forms of agriculture, e.g., wet paddy
rice culture, developed sets of biological systems that resulted in a
very sustainable, very productive operations. What I have heard and read
about are practices such as seeding a hundred varieties of grain in a
field such that the crop of that field is incredibly resistent to disease
or pests --the exact opposite of the profit-maximizing mono-crop culture
practiced by most large-scale agribusiness. Such practices, like
wet-paddy rice cultivation, are also highly sustainable through their
preservation of bio-diversity (genetic diversity etc.) In fact, it is
well known that today the agricultural experts of the North are beginning
to cull the genetically diverse stocks of the South to find replacements
for all the diversity they have destroyed with their hell-bent profit
maximizing methods. In the process they are trying to rip-off the
indigenous peoples of the world by poaching the results of their
practices and knowledge and then monopolizing them to extract the most
profit. Fortunately, indigenous people are getting organized and
fighting back against this new imperialism. (See the current issue of
ABYA YALA NEWS or recent issues of CULTURAL SURVIVAL QUARTERLY). These
are not "myths" Victor, but realities. You can mock such knowledges all
you like, but while you mock, the capitalist researchers are zeroing in
on indigenous communities and environments all over the world to plunder
them because THEY understand the advantages to many traditional
practices.
What I have also heard and read are the studies of how capitalist
practices have been destructive of the environment, both in agriculture
and in industry. Those are not myths either. At the same time, in todays
capitalist society (as in other societies in other times and places)
people work at finding better alternatives to destructive practices and
we have now a great many. We know a great deal in virtually every area.
As I have argued before, we have no lack of alternatives, only the will
and the power to explore them.
> Have you read the recent comments on
> the new study that indicates the Maya declined in part because their
> indigenous, communal, collectivist practices destroyed the
> environment.
Victor: Yes, I have read the stories, and passed them on to those on
Chiapas95. So what? The story by Richard Hanson of UCLA is that the
forests were burned to create the stucco used to cover the pyramids that
exhalted the power of the "ruling classes"! This is not
"communal, collectivist practices" --this is parallel to capitalism in
which a ruling class squanders human and natural resources in its own
interests. And suppose the pyramids WERE just the fancy of a truly
"communal, colectivist" society. Suppose such a society self-destructed.
What we should learn would be the same thing we should learn from
currently destructive capitalist methods: to avoid them! We can identify
such destruction throughout history, in many different kinds of
societies. The only response that makes sense is to subject that history
to the closest scrutiny to discover all those practices to be avoided,
and also all those which worked. The same goes today. The critique of
capitalism is that it tends to screw up the environment because it is
focused on the bottom line, not the long run needs of people and the
earth. Some times it does look at the long run, e.g. Roosevelt's
conservationism, but when the long run object is still profit
maximization the results can still be problematical because only a small
part of the reality can be marketed/seized and made profitable and that
small part may be the focus while there is little or no concern with the
rest. As in for example North American forestry practices. (While we're
on the subject of forest exploitation.)
> It is as though the MArxists are too lazy to have even read MArx, and
> just want to weep and wail. Marx showed that peasant collectivism was
> the form of human society for hundreds of years - it is what we call
> feudal. How can Marxists be so crude today to forget the very analysis
> of Marx himself.
Victor: Which Marxists Victor? Are you back to talking about Stalinist
hacks of the 30s-60s who taught Marx out of officially cleaned up
"Manuals of Political Economy" instead of CAPITAL? Let's do talk about
Marx, now that you have brought him up.
In the first place, Marx did NOT argue that feudalism = "peasant
collectivism". His analysis of feudalism was an analysis of a class society
in which serfs were exploited by lords who controlled the land but which
also contained an elaborately complicated hierarchy. Look at the
COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: "In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost
everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a
manifold gradation of social rank[ . . .] in the Middle ages, feudal
lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs[ . . .]
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was
monopolized by closed guilds [. . .]". And so on. No where that I know
of does Marx EVER argue that feudalism was characterized by "peasant
collectivism".
The truth is that although Marx wrote from time to time about peasants,
say in his writings on Ireland, or on the enclosures in England, or on
post-revolutionary France (best known is the 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte), most of the time his knowledge of peasant organization was
cursory at best. He mostly focused on how they were exploited by other
classes, rather than on their own self-organization.
The most important
exception to this was the case of the Russian peasantry. In the later
part of the 19th Century Marx`s writings reached Russia and provoked
quite a debate between the new Russian Marxists and the Populists over
the issue of the Russian peasantry and the future of social change. When
Marx was drawn into this debate he did something he had never done before
with respect to the peasantry. He undertook some serious study. He
brought to bear on the issue the kind of energy he had used on English
industry. He learned Russian and he read everything he could get his
hands on about the situation, habits and institutions of the Russian
peasants, including the writings of Chernyshevskii, one of the most
famous Russian populists. The results of his studies we have today in the
form of a series of drafts of a letter to Vera Zasulich who had contacted
him from Russia. What makes this material so interesting is that after
finally taking the time and effort to examine a peasantry with some real
"collectivist" traditions (the Russian peasant village was organized in a
MIR or commune) Marx decided that those traditions just might be able to
provide the basis for the "social regeneration of Russia" if only a
revolution could free it from the increasingly tight grasp of capitalism.
In other words, Marx took the side of the populists against the Marxists!
But more to the point here, is that in the one case where Marx thought he
saw a viable peasant collectivism, he embraced it!
> How can we advocate medieval communalism as the
> alternativew to capitalism when it was that structure of the feudal
> state that produced capitalism.
Victor: Who is advocating medieval communalism? No one I know of,
anywhere. This is the thinist of strawmen! What Marx embraced, as just
explained, was a living, breathing communalism, that of the Russian MIR.
What others today, including the Zapatistas, embrace (i.e., want to give
the room and resources to live and grow) is not "medieval communalism"
but the communal practices of Mexican villages where people are
struggling to preserve and strengthen them.
> Indeed, assuming that all peoples
> develop along universal patterns and structures, the entire
> anti-European critique collapses upon itself.
Victor: Frankly, this SOUNDS like old Stalinist historical materialism
with its sterile linear, universal stages theory. Marx, however, was
quite different. He rejected the generalization of his analysis of the
rise of capitalism in England to a general theory. If you doubt this,
read his letter to a Russian editor commenting on such an interpretation
of his writings: "He [Mikhailovski]must by all means transform my
historical sketch of the development of capitalism in Western Europe
into
a historical-philosophical theory of universal development predetermined
by fate for all nations, whatever their historic circumstances in which
they find themselves maybe ..."(1877) Four years later, in a letter to
Zasulich (refered to above) he wrote "The historical inevitability of
this movement, the genesis of capitalist production is, thus expressly
confined to the countries of Western Europe . . . Thus, the analysis
presented in DAS CAPITAL contains no proofs --neither for nor against the
viability of the village commune" (And then, as I said above, he goes on
to argue that it could provide the "fulcrum" for the social regeneration
of Russia.
The Mexica were producing elements of
> a commercial regime out of their own feudalism, if I may use those
> terms loosely for the sake of analogy.
Victor: I wouldn't use the term, if I were you. It IS "very weak and
unconvincing"--as you say below. But suppose it is true, suppose there
was a developing pre-capitalist "commercial regime" in Mexico and Central
America. So what? There was such commercial development throughout the
ancient world. Unfortuntely the vast majority of cuneiform tablets are
full of commercial accounts, not variations on Gilgamesh or other such
literary texts. But so what? In the light of the above quotes, it would
certainly be very un-Marxist to argue that the Mexica were about to give
birth to capitalism! But suppose they were? So what? What is at issue
today in Chiapas (and elsewhere in Mexico as well) is whether people want
to continue to pursue the development of a social system which has
demonstrated over a period of hundreds of years athat it perpetuates
exploitation, racism, sexism, brutality and a whole list of other
obnoxious characteristics, or whether they want to explore alternatives.
That is the question. The answer is clear: some do, some don't. Then the
question becomes: who do you support? My answer, and the answer of many
others, is: I support those trying to develop and elaborate alternatives.
> So my objection is not to a leftist challenge to capitalism, it is with
> the very weak and unconvincing quality of the analysis the left
> produces on the Internet. It is immature, ungrounded in research or
> even any depth in scholarly accomplishment.
Victor: Arguments do not become "weak and unconvincing" by calling them
so. That has to be demonstrated. You can try. Unfortunately, you seem to
prefer name-calling (e.g., immature, ungrounded, adolesecent) to real
argumentation. Too bad. You can't win that way, you know? You can't even
develop your own understanding, much less that of anyone else.
> It seems forever to reinvent the
> wheel, as though its purpose is purely to satisfy the emotional
cravings of the writers, and not serious analysis at all.
Victor: See what I mean? As for "emotional cravings" and "serious
analysis", I should hope those two things are NEVER divorced. Spock is
amusing enough on Star Trek, but I would suggest that the best arguments
are always produced by great passion, even if great passion doesn't
always produce the best arguments.
> Hence I am forced to
> resort to follow the logic of the neoliberals, because their own
> self-criticism is more productive than the essentially sterile
> whimperings of my own leftist comrades, with whom I share sentiment,
> but not weakness of head, I hope.
> Victor Story
> Kutztown U.
Victor: I don't think that you follow the logic of the neoliberals
because your own "leftist comrades" have nothing better to offer. I think
you have embraced capitalism and perhaps its neoliberal incarnation
because you simply don't or can't (and I'm beginning to think refuse to)
see the living alternatives around you or visualize further alternatives.
However, we will all continue to "follow the logic of the neoliberals" as
well as "their own self-criticism". Some may do it the way you do,
looking for the solutions to problems. Others may do it the way I do,
spying on their thinking and on their strategies and tactics (and their
evolution through self-criticism) in order to develop defenses against
their continuing attempts to exploit and repress us and to develop
offensive strategies for widening our spaces of maneuver for creating
new ways of being and new kinds of social organization.
======================================
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173
USA
Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 471-3211
Fax: (512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave@mundo.eco.utexas.edu
======================================