http://www.apk2000.dk/netavisen/billeder/Satire/statue_of_liberty.jpg

Massacre is an acquired taste. The United States is arguably the only country on the planet whose national personality and self-image is rooted in centuries of unremitting expansion through race war punctuated by massacre. There have always been “free-fire zones” all along the coveted, ever moving peripheries of white American power, from the “Indian country” surrounding the settler beachheads of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown to the “Sunni Triangle” of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Whole peoples – millions – have been erased in the glorious march of American Manifest Destiny.

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/photos-nativeamerican/WoundedKneeMasacre.jpg

It is true that the globe-ravaging European colonial powers certainly killed more human beings in the course of their imperial careers than their settler sons in North America. However, the national characters of Britain, Spain, France, Holland and Belgium were already formed when the Great European Breakout and Worldwide Pillage commenced. Although their wealth was later built on the blood and bones of faraway “natives” and slaves, European civil societies were already shaped by long histories of conflict among themselves, between classes and nations on their small sub-continent. Britain and France stretched forth their naval and army tentacles to ensure that wealth arrived in Liverpool and Marseilles, but the colonized peoples did not effectively intrude on the evolution of European society.

Nobody had to invent the historical personalities of the Frenchman in France, the Englishman in England. Their civil societies were deeply impacted – and some sectors greatly enriched – by the existence of the colonies, but not (until very recently) by the foreign peoples who died for European prosperity.

The English settler colonies in North America were different – unique. Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native’s expense, and unlimited expansion. Less than a century and a half after the massacre and near-erasure of the Pequots – in celebration of which the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the first day of Pilgrim Thanksgiving – the white colonists decided that they were a distinct people, no longer Europeans.

They were right. American colonial society was shaped by constant depredations against non-whites, close up and brutal. By 1776, one out of five non-Indian residents of the colonies were Black slaves, the control and dehumanization of which had become a daily collective duty of much of the white population. Across the Alleghenies lay unconquered Indian lands that, once cleansed, could usher into being a white empire that would dwarf Europe. The English King and his treaties with the Indians stood in the way; he had to go.

The “American” mission was clear, manifest: to endlessly expand through the elimination of impediments posed by the External Other (“savage” Indians), while keeping white society safe and separate from the “debauchery” of the valuable, Internal Other (Black slaves). This is the foundation on which the American iconography and celebration is based. Lacking any other, it is the template of white American identity and purported “civilization.”

http://www.notinourname.net/store/images/fs/got-democracy-lg.jpg

LINK (http://chlamor-deepintheheartofnowhere.blogspot.com/2007/12/massacre-is-acquired-taste.html)

A serious question

In what respect is an ideological indictment of White Society helpful? You are not going to guilt people into repenting their sins anymore than you can expect to win American support by detailing and denouncing the hypocrisy of those living in the most fortified bastion of imperialism (us)

Much of what you detail predates the capitalist mode of production and certainly industrialization. We need be careful not to transform opportunities for real agitation and criticism into pathways for our own agendas. If Western Civilization has indeed veered into barbarism and insanity that is a legitimate topic of discussion. But it needs to be done in a thorough, scientific manner with an eye towards what we can do and what lessons we can draw, not by simple proclamation, decree, and intimation.

Socialism is not only a means of abolishing capitalism. But neither is exploitation unique to capitalism or uncommon throughout human history.

Much to tell here, so lets separate out the personal ideology from real historical perspective and analysis.

I ask the above because I don't know where this goes

In what respect is an ideological indictment of White Society helpful? You are not going to guilt people....

Those two sentences are not consistent with each other.

"White" is a set of attitudes and a way of thinking that has a political function, it is not a skin color nor a "race."

Interesting thing here Kid -

What you just posted led me to two conclusions:

1. Modern society is far more racist that even I realize

2. Racism is far more potent as a tool for working class oppression than I thought it was.

Damn. Race really is the key to working class oppression. It really is the central myth that keeps the little white boys in line to kiss ruling class ass.

Poor little white liberatrian guys - I am going to increase my work and posts on race by a factor of 10 now, and they are already wehining that they are tired of hearing about it lol. Of course they start saying they are tiered of hearing about it before anyone says anything about it.

You connecting racism with trying to make individual white people feel "guilty" is itself the racist concept speaking. Can you see that?

Why would any white guy (it is almost all guys) feel personally guilty about this? "Guilty" is a cop out - I think they are lying when they say that. It does not mean "why should I feel guilty?" it means "why should I have to give up being white or look at what that means?"

A serious question

In what respect is an ideological indictment of White Society helpful? You are not going to guilt people into repenting their sins anymore than you can expect to win American support by detailing and denouncing the hypocrisy of those living in the most fortified bastion of imperialism (us)

Much of what you detail predates the capitalist mode of production and certainly industrialization. We need be careful not to transform opportunities for real agitation and criticism into pathways for our own agendas. If Western Civilization has indeed veered into barbarism and insanity that is a legitimate topic of discussion. But it needs to be done in a thorough, scientific manner with an eye towards what we can do and what lessons we can draw, not by simple proclamation, decree, and intimation.

Socialism is not only a means of abolishing capitalism. But neither is exploitation unique to capitalism or uncommon throughout human history.

Much to tell here, so lets separate out the personal ideology from real historical perspective and analysis.

I ask the above because I don't know where this goes

Are you okay Kid?

The indictment is factual and historical nothing ideological going on. I didn't notice you actually questioning any factoid here. So who's talking ideological there?

I'm not interested in "guilting" anyone into anything. Most imperious white liberal assholes I know, all of them in fact, don't know shit about humility or feel even the slightest bit of guilt about their undeserved place in the world that has been built upon the backs of brown-skinned folks for the most part. What don't you see?

I'm not interested in "accomplishing" anything Kid. "Where it goes" isn't utmost in my consideration, just stating the obvious truth in a time where such brutal realities are considered "bad form" and everyone is concerned about their appearance- "being careful."

Let me assure you Kid I'm every bit and more outspoken in flesh and blood. Of course please comment all you want but the advice you might save for another.

"We" don't need to be careful about shit. In case you haven't noticed I'm not running for office.

Interesting thing here Kid -

What you just posted led me to two conclusions:

1. Modern society is far more racist that even I realize

2. Racism is far more potent as a tool for working class oppression than I thought it was.

Damn. Race really is the key to working class oppression. It really is the central myth that keeps the little white boys in line to kiss ruling class ass.

Poor little white liberatrian guys - I am going to increase my work and posts on race by a factor of 10 now, and they are already wehining that they are tired of hearing about it lol. Of course they start saying they are tiered of hearing about it before anyone says anything about it.

You connecting racism with trying to make individual white people feel "guilty" is itself the racist concept speaking. Can you see that?

Why would any white guy (it is almost all guys) feel personally guilty about this? "Guilty" is a cop out - I think they are lying when they say that. It does not mean "why should I feel guilty?" it means "why should I have to give up being white or look at what that means?"

Mike, you've totally missed the context of Chlamor's post IMO and I guess its no surprise, given that, that you didn't remotely follow my reply.

What does that blogpost say but that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nature of Western Society that has driven it to barbarism and brutality and exploitation.? But yet none of those things are unique to our times or even unique to the last 400 years or..how long, Mike?

Does this help us to pinpoint our own place in time as history plays out in realtime or is this just a highly charged polemic against "The West"? If the the latter, I don't take offense at that, but you can't claim it has anything to do with politics of the here and now.

And, no Mike, the history of savagery and exploitation dating back to '1492' is not and cannot be encapsulated solely by "racism". You're brighter than me and a much better critical thinker, no way should you be talking in such pat, generic terms. If you want to talk about race, lets do it -- of COURSE its dictated most of America history, denying that is profoundly ignorant and short-sighted. But you have to connect the dots, not just make some generic appeal to "racism" as its existed for the latter half of the millenium. (And, why confine ourselves to that time frame anyway?)

A serious question

In what respect is an ideological indictment of White Society helpful? You are not going to guilt people into repenting their sins anymore than you can expect to win American support by detailing and denouncing the hypocrisy of those living in the most fortified bastion of imperialism (us)

Much of what you detail predates the capitalist mode of production and certainly industrialization. We need be careful not to transform opportunities for real agitation and criticism into pathways for our own agendas. If Western Civilization has indeed veered into barbarism and insanity that is a legitimate topic of discussion. But it needs to be done in a thorough, scientific manner with an eye towards what we can do and what lessons we can draw, not by simple proclamation, decree, and intimation.

Socialism is not only a means of abolishing capitalism. But neither is exploitation unique to capitalism or uncommon throughout human history.

Much to tell here, so lets separate out the personal ideology from real historical perspective and analysis.

I ask the above because I don't know where this goes

Are you okay Kid?

The indictment is factual and historical nothing ideological going on. I didn't notice you actually questioning any factoid here. So who's talking ideological there?

I'm not interested in "guilting" anyone into anything. Most imperious white liberal assholes I know, all of them in fact, don't know shit about humility or feel even the slightest bit of guilt about their undeserved place in the world that has been built upon the backs of brown-skinned folks for the most part. What don't you see?

I'm not interested in "accomplishing" anything Kid. "Where it goes" isn't utmost in my consideration, just stating the obvious truth in a time where such brutal realities are considered "bad form" and everyone is concerned about their appearance- "being careful."

Let me assure you Kid I'm every bit and more outspoken in flesh and blood. Of course please comment all you want but the advice you might save for another.

"We" don't need to be careful about shit. In case you haven't noticed I'm not running for office.

You're way too strung out. Just wanted to know was what you're about here no need to get pissy. If you unconditionally hate Western Civilization as it has developed over the last 400-500 years sure as hell no one can fault you for that. But it is something that others who do not operate from such a glossed over understanding of history need to be aware of. And is certainly not a basis or foundation for coherent political discussion.

Mike is acting as though I'm somehow defending the mythical construct of White Society and/or that your essay here -- and the works of Howard Zinn et al are intended as anything other than a massive guilt trip. And then others are faulted for perceiving them as such. A spade's a spade.

You're way too strung out. Just wanted to know was what you're about here no need to get pissy. If you unconditionally hate Western Civilization as it has developed over the last 400-500 years sure as hell no one can fault you for that. But it is something that others who do not operate from such a glossed over understanding of history need to be aware of. And is certainly not a basis or foundation for coherent political discussion.

Mike is acting as though I'm somehow defending the mythical construct of White Society and/or that your essay here -- and the works of Howard Zinn et al are intended as anything other than a massive guilt trip. And then others are faulted for perceiving them as such. A spade's a spade.

Funny stuff Kid. I'm not strung out in the least.

Why is it that people assume that someone who recounts the horrors of The Imperium and investigates in detail the atrocities of The Heart of Darkness must be "strung out" when they smackdown someone who recants the very same verbiage of white liberal leisures who get wiggy when such gruesome truths are thrown in their face.

"Ew-ew-ew no need to get pissy here. Can't you just discuss this in civil(ized) tones."

Pretty funny shit Kid.

What is it about racism you don't get?

And how funny it is that you send off with "A spade's a spade" in a discussion about race.

http://www.wpclipart.com/recreation/games/card_deck/spade_2.png

Mike, you've totally missed the context of Chlamor's post IMO and I guess its no surprise, given that, that you didn't remotely follow my reply.

What does that blogpost say but that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nature of Western Society that has driven it to barbarism and brutality and exploitation.? But yet none of those things are unique to our times or even unique to the last 400 years or..how long, Mike?

Does this help us to pinpoint our own place in time as history plays out in realtime or is this just a highly charged polemic against "The West"? If the the latter, I don't take offense at that, but you can't claim it has anything to do with politics of the here and now.

And, no Mike, the history of savagery and exploitation dating back to '1492' is not and cannot be encapsulated solely by "racism". You're brighter than me and a much better critical thinker, no way should you be talking in such pat, generic terms. If you want to talk about race, lets do it -- of COURSE its dictated most of America history, denying that is profoundly ignorant and short-sighted. But you have to connect the dots, not just make some generic appeal to "racism" as its existed for the latter half of the millenium. (And, why confine ourselves to that time frame anyway?)

The discussion keeps breaking down. Here is my latest guess...

You have three things in your mind I am guessing: the current political situation; our own ideas and thinking; the historical context. You don't want to accept connection between those three. That's what I am thinking.

I can't see what you are objecting to in my remarks to you or in my interpretation of the OP. You have to explain that to me.

Mike, you've totally missed the context of Chlamor's post IMO and I guess its no surprise, given that, that you didn't remotely follow my reply.

What does that blogpost say but that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nature of Western Society that has driven it to barbarism and brutality and exploitation.? But yet none of those things are unique to our times or even unique to the last 400 years or..how long, Mike?

Does this help us to pinpoint our own place in time as history plays out in realtime or is this just a highly charged polemic against "The West"? If the the latter, I don't take offense at that, but you can't claim it has anything to do with politics of the here and now.

And, no Mike, the history of savagery and exploitation dating back to '1492' is not and cannot be encapsulated solely by "racism". You're brighter than me and a much better critical thinker, no way should you be talking in such pat, generic terms. If you want to talk about race, lets do it -- of COURSE its dictated most of America history, denying that is profoundly ignorant and short-sighted. But you have to connect the dots, not just make some generic appeal to "racism" as its existed for the latter half of the millenium. (And, why confine ourselves to that time frame anyway?)

The discussion keeps breaking down. Here is my latest guess...

You have three things in your mind I am guessing: the current political situation; our own ideas and thinking; the historical context. You don't want to accept connection between those three. That's what I am thinking.

I can't see what you are objecting to in my remarks to you or in my interpretation of the OP. You have to explain that to me.

No, that is a bunch of equivocating nonsense and a load of crap besides.

I can highlight ten separate sentences in this piece that are antithetical to every thing you've ever posted on here.

What would it mean if this piece were written by Russell Means or Howard Zinn? At its core is this a stealth anti-technology/industrialization rant dressed up as a critique of endemic/systemic racism? If its not, thats great -- but then tell me what it fuckings means in ANY other context?

And while we're at it, spare me the passe "We need a Revolution" talk. This article sounds like it was intended as a funeral oratory, when it is clear that the workers want and need a positive, realistic vision of the future. On what other basis do you propose to proceed?

And to talk about that question in any depth we'll have to break the taboo this place has about actually descibing and defining socialism both within its historical usage and what it means today. And, academese or not, that means talking about the other -isms too.

EDIT: Mike, its a tautology. Because of their massive greed, West Europe became an expansionist Empire that has now overrun the globe. Why? Because of unchecked avarice and, possibly, hate. This of course leads directly to all the ills of modern society.

Only it fucking doesn't. Not because its factually wrong. Because this explanation is no explanation at all. I agree beyond a doubt with the premise that mankind is sick. But you cannot pin 40,000 years of humans living in a state of barbarism on racism or expansionism or greed. If Chlamor wants to tell the whole story, I'm all ears.

Might a taste for acquisition be a prerequisite for acquiring a taste for massacre? Or are there examples such behavior not driven by material considerations? Off hand I can't think of any, I shall have to think more on that.

Going with that for the moment the question is, "how did the West get in a position of being the dominant predatory society?". Jared Diamond is helpful with this, by demonstrating the larger the land mass the larger the pool of potential food plants and the superiority of a longitudinal axis over a latitudinal axis for the spread and adoption agricultural practices he explains how practices based in southwest Asia and the greater populations made possible by such practices had a leg up on most everybody else.

I think if you add consideration of fanatically monotheistic Abrahamic religion as both a unifying force and carte blanc for expansion and you've got something of a perfect storm.

There have been other practitioners of wholesale ugliness, the Mongol perchance for emptying districts of human life in order to increase pasturage is known, but I find that rather straightforward, bad enough, but without all of the bullshit that the West has used to justify it's deprivations.

I think it's fair to say that with Western Civilization, historically speaking, all roads lead to Rome. Rome has been the ideal of the ruling class since the beginning and particularly for the bourgeoisie who imagine themselves as the patrician/senatorial class. Yet the Roman state did not adopt Abrahamic religion until it was well into decline, so that turd won't stick. Rome's ills were the same as Capital's, the need for expansion. When Rome stopped expanding the supply of cheap war booty slaves dried up and economic decline set in a few generations later. The Romans never needed an ideology for their aggression other than localized causi belli, it was strictly bidness.

Fuck, I'm rambling again.

I think the trouble is hierarchy, and I know that'll get me in trouble. But I can't see nothing for it. Have there been any expansionists/aggressive egalitarian societies? Not that I know of. That makes the whole abrahamic thing not a source cause but rather the icing on the cake, a tool of hierarchy.

Might a taste for acquisition be a prerequisite for acquiring a taste for massacre? Or are there examples such behavior not driven by material considerations? Off hand I can't think of any, I shall have to think more on that.

Going with that for the moment the question is, "how did the West get in a position of being the dominant predatory society?". Jared Diamond is helpful with this, by demonstrating the larger the land mass the larger the pool of potential food plants and the superiority of a longitudinal axis over a latitudinal axis for the spread and adoption agricultural practices he explains how practices based in southwest Asia and the greater populations made possible by such practices had a leg up on most everybody else.

I think if you add consideration of fanatically monotheistic Abrahamic religion as both a unifying force and carte blanc for expansion and you've got something of a perfect storm.

There have been other practitioners of wholesale ugliness, the Mongol perchance for emptying districts of human life in order to increase pasturage is known, but I find that rather straightforward, bad enough, but without all of the bullshit that the West has used to justify it's deprivations.

I think it's fair to say that with Western Civilization, historically speaking, all roads lead to Rome. Rome has been the ideal of the ruling class since the beginning and particularly for the bourgeoisie who imagine themselves as the patrician/senatorial class. Yet the Roman state did not adopt Abrahamic religion until it was well into decline, so that turd won't stick. Rome's ills were the same as Capital's, the need for expansion. When Rome stopped expanding the supply of cheap war booty slaves dried up and economic decline set in a few generations later. The Romans never needed an ideology for their aggression other than localized causi belli, it was strictly bidness.

Fuck, I'm rambling again.

I think the trouble is hierarchy, and I know that'll get me in trouble. But I can't see nothing for it. Have there been any expansionists/aggressive egalitarian societies? Not that I know of. That makes the whole abrahamic thing not a source cause but rather the icing on the cake, a tool of hierarchy.

Ever read about Shaka? You can watch the "mini-series" but it isn't nearly as good. Shaka reproduced a few hundred years of Roman evolution in a few decades. Yes, it was moved by outside pressures but the organizing principle was internal. Pastoral tribes people became warriors, warriors became legionnaires... all within the structure of the Zulu impi. They even reinvented the Roman short sword (the "Spanish Sword") by cutting down a simple hunting spear. Thus the rule by assegai began. How far could it have gone?

http://www.heavinforge.co.za/Kevin_Assegai.jpg

What is "Western"? Was Genghis Western? Was Attila or Tamerlane? How about the "Germans" who became "French" and "Spanish" and "Italian"? What of the Moors who through defeat founded the first great post feudal empire? Were they "Western"?

When human beings find that they can improve their station (a certain point in human production) by enslaving other human beings, the die is cast on all things. The first to go is the humanity of those who remain "human". Local conditions slow down the process and of course, once the process begins, all who are "behind" are already lost to the competition... but the east/west thing is bullshit.

It ain't ideas which "make" human beings but the circumstances of human beings which make their ideas. Things are already so far down the road by the time you get to poor old Abraham that you might as well credit the invention of rock and roll to Kurt Cobain.

And as far as "hierarchy" goes... that's just your predisposition. You can't even define "it" and trying to merely makes the case twice.
.

...you might as well credit the invention of rock and roll to Kurt Cobain.

ura real fuckin' heretic.


umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu

Hmm

Dear Anax,

I was expecting you to rip me a new asshole yet again in this thread. While its true that my rectum may not be the heartiest or the most accomodating, I've come to accept and value such anal aggression. In a totally non gay way of course.

So at your leisure..

I can highlight ten separate sentences in this piece that are antithetical to every thing you've ever posted on here.

OK. Do so.


Because of their massive greed, West Europe became an expansionist Empire that has now overrun the globe. Why? Because of unchecked avarice and, possibly, hate. This of course leads directly to all the ills of modern society.

Um, are you sure that empire is caused by some moral flaw in human nature - greed and avarice and hatred - rather than by, oh say, capitalism?


Only it fucking doesn't. Not because its factually wrong. Because this explanation is no explanation at all. I agree beyond a doubt with the premise that mankind is sick. But you cannot pin 40,000 years of humans living in a state of barbarism on racism or expansionism or greed. If Chlamor wants to tell the whole story, I'm all ears.

I don't agree that "mankind is sick." If I did, I would be communing with the gurus or the shrinks rather than talking politics.

I am not sure that humans living in a state of barbarism for 40,000 years has any relevance to the current political situation.

Um, are you sure that empire is caused by some moral flaw in human nature - greed and avarice and hatred - rather than by, oh say, capitalism?
...

I am not sure that humans living in a state of barbarism for 40,000 years has any relevance to the current political situation.

Oh but it is very relevant, if only fer the fact that we today are living within that continuum. Barbarism or capitalism are to me not the most precise words in fully grasping this, nor am I able to offer much better. But whatsay that the whole of human history has been a complex one that has included in most places at one time or another

exploitation of man by man

?

Even when egalitarian ideas have been cultural keys there has been wars or some sort of social discord. It comes in many flavors. But at the core isn't the change in history we desire to see come into existence that of a wholly non-exploitative social relations?

Um, are you sure that empire is caused by some moral flaw in human nature - greed and avarice and hatred - rather than by, oh say, capitalism?

Mike this is a total disconnect. #1 I was parroting what Chlamor is saying, not my own opinion or thoughts. But just as importantly, the New World Conquest was not a product of capitalism. Most of the history Chlamor traces out is not caused by capitalism. If we go down the road your comment seems to suggest we'd blame the cause of capitalism on..

..capitalism.

As for mankind being sick or not, did you read Anax's post? He's better at hitting stuff on the nub than me:



When human beings find that they can improve their station (a certain point in human production) by enslaving other human beings, the die is cast on all things. The first to go is the humanity of those who remain "human". Local conditions slow down the process and of course, once the process begins, all who are "behind" are already lost to the competition... but the east/west thing is bullshit.

Socialism as a step away from capitalism is really about the abolishment pf private property. What is private property BUT a pathological relation between mankind -- both between men and between mankind and his material living circumstances (going all the way up to the planet as a whole)?

As for the article, I implore you to reconcile your own writings with this gem. Forget 10, answer this one and I gladly concede the point and apologize for being way offbase and meekly withdraw from the discussion and never question anything to flow from the pen of Chlamor ever again


Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native’s expense, and unlimited expansion.

Um, are you sure that empire is caused by some moral flaw in human nature - greed and avarice and hatred - rather than by, oh say, capitalism?
...

I am not sure that humans living in a state of barbarism for 40,000 years has any relevance to the current political situation.

Oh but it is very relevant, if only fer the fact that we today are living within that continuum. Barbarism or capitalism are to me not the most precise words in fully grasping this, nor am I able to offer much better. But whatsay that the whole of human history has been a complex one that has included in most places at one time or another

exploitation of man by man

?

Even when egalitarian ideas have been cultural keys there has been wars or some sort of social discord. It comes in many flavors. But at the core isn't the change in history we desire to see come into existence that of a wholly non-exploitative social relations?

But explotiation of man by man comes about because of a disequilibrium between man and his real living conditions -- manifested in the form of private property. From there the rest can't help but follow. And the result is what can only be termed 'savage', 'brutal', 'barbarism (and I'm culling that word from M&E so if we want a different term thats OK with me)

Barbarism or capitalism are to me not the most precise words in fully grasping this, nor am I able to offer much better. But whatsay that the whole of human history has been a complex one that has included in most places at one time or another

exploitation of man by man

?

Even when egalitarian ideas have been cultural keys there has been wars or some sort of social discord. It comes in many flavors. But at the core isn't the change in history we desire to see come into existence that of a wholly non-exploitative social relations?

It ain't so, manic-depressive one... What is the basis of exploitation if accumulation can't exist? What can I do with your fish if it rots. What you wanna describe comes with "husbandry", a well chosen word. Before that, captives are killed, eaten or most often, adopted. There is so little "dissension" that the universal form of decisions is "consensus" and the most common form is everyone must agree. Didn't you read up on the councils of the Iroquois - 35000 people and unanimous agreement? Try that with any ten people in our culture. Modern forms are very recent and in every case there are centuries of nostalgia afterwards. Every effort is made to stop it - from potlatch to Theseus wiping out private property. "Democracy" is not the triumph of the Greeks - it is the ruination of the Greek gens and with them, alll that was really noble in the human condition. Classes are a recent cancer.

Chlamor's barbarian utopia is absolutely accurate. It seems to have lasted for a million years. The only issue is how to get back there. Do we destroy "technology" and unlearn our original sins or do we get back there on a new foundation - nature plus cable TV... perhaps this time with less human for lunch.
.

Barbarism or capitalism are to me not the most precise words in fully grasping this, nor am I able to offer much better. But whatsay that the whole of human history has been a complex one that has included in most places at one time or another

exploitation of man by man

?

Even when egalitarian ideas have been cultural keys there has been wars or some sort of social discord. It comes in many flavors. But at the core isn't the change in history we desire to see come into existence that of a wholly non-exploitative social relations?

It ain't so, manic-depressive one... What is the basis of exploitation if accumulation can't exist? What can I do with your fish if it rots. What you wanna describe comes with "husbandry", a well chosen word. Before that, captives are killed, eaten or most often, adopted. There is so little "dissension" that the universal form of decisions is "consensus" and the most common form is everyone must agree. Didn't you read up on the councils of the Iroquois - 35000 people and unanimous agreement? Try that with any ten people in our culture. Modern forms are very recent and in every case there are centuries of nostalgia afterwards. Every effort is made to stop it - from potlatch to Theseus wiping out private property. "Democracy" is not the triumph of the Greeks - it is the ruination of the Greek gens and with them, alll that was really noble in the human condition. Classes are a recent cancer.

Chlamor's barbarian utopia is absolutely accurate. It seems to have lasted for a million years. The only issue is how to get back there. Do we destroy "technology" and unlearn our original sins or do we get back there on a new foundation - nature plus cable TV... perhaps this time with less human for lunch.
.

Aren't you talking about a qualitative leap forward being undone? Damn, no wonder you call everyone else a post-industrialist..

Might a taste for acquisition be a prerequisite for acquiring a taste for massacre? Or are there examples such behavior not driven by material considerations? Off hand I can't think of any, I shall have to think more on that.

Going with that for the moment the question is, "how did the West get in a position of being the dominant predatory society?". Jared Diamond is helpful with this, by demonstrating the larger the land mass the larger the pool of potential food plants and the superiority of a longitudinal axis over a latitudinal axis for the spread and adoption agricultural practices he explains how practices based in southwest Asia and the greater populations made possible by such practices had a leg up on most everybody else.

I think if you add consideration of fanatically monotheistic Abrahamic religion as both a unifying force and carte blanc for expansion and you've got something of a perfect storm.

There have been other practitioners of wholesale ugliness, the Mongol perchance for emptying districts of human life in order to increase pasturage is known, but I find that rather straightforward, bad enough, but without all of the bullshit that the West has used to justify it's deprivations.

I think it's fair to say that with Western Civilization, historically speaking, all roads lead to Rome. Rome has been the ideal of the ruling class since the beginning and particularly for the bourgeoisie who imagine themselves as the patrician/senatorial class. Yet the Roman state did not adopt Abrahamic religion until it was well into decline, so that turd won't stick. Rome's ills were the same as Capital's, the need for expansion. When Rome stopped expanding the supply of cheap war booty slaves dried up and economic decline set in a few generations later. The Romans never needed an ideology for their aggression other than localized causi belli, it was strictly bidness.

Fuck, I'm rambling again.

I think the trouble is hierarchy, and I know that'll get me in trouble. But I can't see nothing for it. Have there been any expansionists/aggressive egalitarian societies? Not that I know of. That makes the whole abrahamic thing not a source cause but rather the icing on the cake, a tool of hierarchy.

Ever read about Shaka? You can watch the "mini-series" but it isn't nearly as good. Shaka reproduced a few hundred years of Roman evolution in a few decades. Yes, it was moved by outside pressures but the organizing principle was internal. Pastoral tribes people became warriors, warriors became legionnaires... all within the structure of the Zulu impi. They even reinvented the Roman short sword (the "Spanish Sword") by cutting down a simple hunting spear. Thus the rule by assegai began. How far could it have gone?

http://www.heavinforge.co.za/Kevin_Assegai.jpg

What is "Western"? Was Genghis Western? Was Attila or Tamerlane? How about the "Germans" who became "French" and "Spanish" and "Italian"? What of the Moors who through defeat founded the first great post feudal empire? Were they "Western"?

When human beings find that they can improve their station (a certain point in human production) by enslaving other human beings, the die is cast on all things. The first to go is the humanity of those who remain "human". Local conditions slow down the process and of course, once the process begins, all who are "behind" are already lost to the competition... but the east/west thing is bullshit.

It ain't ideas which "make" human beings but the circumstances of human beings which make their ideas. Things are already so far down the road by the time you get to poor old Abraham that you might as well credit the invention of rock and roll to Kurt Cobain.

And as far as "hierarchy" goes... that's just your predisposition. You can't even define "it" and trying to merely makes the case twice.
.

Yeah, Shaka slipped my mind, his tactical system was remarkably similar to the Romans. On matters non-military, I forget.

Of course ya don't have to be "Western" to be a dick, but it does help. Those transient Teutons & friends were Western, adopting all manner of cultural attributes of the society which they overran, with old Karl Der Grosse being an exemplar. I think if it's derived from Rome, it's Western. Byzantium being out of the way makes for a cleaner definition.

Getting close to that mushy question of "human nature". Is exploitation inevitable given a certain level of productive capability? I'm guessing that's what you, and by proxy Marx, is saying. Ain't gonna argue that, hell, I'm sinking already, but it seems that observation makes the case for hard core primitivists.

I'll not argue ideas/circumstances either, you're right. Old Abe and his crap are just a refined and codified version of what had been going, but the monotheist twist was new and terribly efficient.

Ya got my predilection pegged, no bout a doubt it. I dunno, Anax, I've read enough now to recognise Marx's massive intellectual superiority over Bakunin, yet his heart and spirit, his faith in the masses make him impossible to deny. So in an act of futile masochism I'll go look the old feller up as I've lost all of my bookmarks recently.

Barbarism or capitalism are to me not the most precise words in fully grasping this, nor am I able to offer much better. But whatsay that the whole of human history has been a complex one that has included in most places at one time or another

exploitation of man by man

?

Even when egalitarian ideas have been cultural keys there has been wars or some sort of social discord. It comes in many flavors. But at the core isn't the change in history we desire to see come into existence that of a wholly non-exploitative social relations?

It ain't so, manic-depressive one... What is the basis of exploitation if accumulation can't exist? What can I do with your fish if it rots. What you wanna describe comes with "husbandry", a well chosen word. Before that, captives are killed, eaten or most often, adopted. There is so little "dissension" that the universal form of decisions is "consensus" and the most common form is everyone must agree. Didn't you read up on the councils of the Iroquois - 35000 people and unanimous agreement? Try that with any ten people in our culture. Modern forms are very recent and in every case there are centuries of nostalgia afterwards. Every effort is made to stop it - from potlatch to Theseus wiping out private property. "Democracy" is not the triumph of the Greeks - it is the ruination of the Greek gens and with them, alll that was really noble in the human condition. Classes are a recent cancer.

Chlamor's barbarian utopia is absolutely accurate. It seems to have lasted for a million years. The only issue is how to get back there. Do we destroy "technology" and unlearn our original sins or do we get back there on a new foundation - nature plus cable TV... perhaps this time with less human for lunch.
.

Aren't you talking about a qualitative leap forward being undone? Damn, no wonder you call everyone else a post-industrialist..

What gets "undone"? Classes... uneven development with giant decaying cities and a depopulated and often impoverished countryside? National fractionalization? "Religion"? "Racism"? Genocide? Great plenty bought at the expense of great misery? Alienation to the point that humans sit in folding chairs with popcorn, seemingly as uninvolved watchers while their inanimate creations appear to be the play? Read that little speech of Marx's again.

I'm not for going "back" on anything... Science, technology, logic, trashy Indian novels, air conditioning.... all remain in my world. I'm just "goin' back" on class society. Communism and primitive communism.

...and maybe we could lighten up a little on "Hummers for the masses".
.

Ya got my predilection pegged, no bout a doubt it. I dunno, Anax, I've read enough now to recognise Marx's massive intellectual superiority over Bakunin, yet his heart and spirit, his faith in the masses make him impossible to deny. So in an act of futile masochism I'll go look the old feller up as I've lost all of my bookmarks recently.

Even Bakunin conceeded he agreed on the important stuff. It's the disciples that are the problem. I'm convinced they've got little in common with either. Let's defer it until we get in that tactical situation. You can go for Dinamitos and I'll go for Red Guards. Maybe there will be enough opposition so that we never get around to each other... (likely).

Seriously, bp... I wrote the narodnik thing because I just don't see the "split" in the way its been made out for the century since...

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/12.NR/SCMEDIA/8b.gif

First, it is necessary to indicate what kind of authority anarchism challenges. While it is customary for some opponents of anarchism to assert that anarchists oppose all kinds of authority, the reality of the situation is more complex. While anarchists have, on occasion, stated their opposition to "all authority" a closer reading quickly shows that anarchists reject only one specific form of authority, what we tend to call hierarchy (see section H.4 for more details). This can be seen when Bakunin stated that "the principle of authority" was the "eminently theological, metaphysical and political idea that the masses, always incapable of governing themselves, must submit at all times to the benevolent yoke of a wisdom and a justice, which in one way or another, is imposed from above." [Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 33]

Other forms of authority are more acceptable to anarchists, it depends whether the authority in question becomes a source of power over others or not. That is the key to understanding the anarchist position on authority -- if it is hierarchical authority, then anarchists are against it. . The reason is simple:

"[n]o one should be entrusted with power, inasmuch as anyone invested with authority must . . . became an oppressor and exploiter of society." [Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 249]

This distinction between forms of authority is important. As Erich Fromm pointed out, "authority" is "a broad term with two entirely different meanings: it can be either 'rational' or 'irrational' authority. Rational authority is based on competence, and it helps the person who leans on it to grow. Irrational authority is based on power and serves to exploit the person subjected to it." [To Have or To Be, pp. 44-45] The same point was made by Bakunin over 100 years earlier when he indicated the difference between authority and "natural influence." For Bakunin, individual freedom "results from th[e] great number of material, intellectual, and moral influences which every individual around him [or her] and which society . . . continually exercise . . . To abolish this mutual influence would be to die." Consequently, "when we reclaim the freedom of the masses, we hardly wish to abolish the effect of any individual's or any group of individual's natural influence upon the masses. What we wish is to abolish artificial, privileged, legal, and official influences." [The Basic Bakunin, p. 140 and p. 141]

It is, in other words, the difference between taking part in a decision and listening to alternative viewpoints and experts ("natural influence") before making your mind up and having a decision made for you by a separate group of individuals (who may or may not be elected) because that is their role in an organisation or society. In the former, the individual exercises their judgement and freedom (i.e. is based on rational authority). In the latter, they are subjected to the wills of others, to hierarchical authority (i.e. is based on irrational authority). This is because rational authority "not only permits but requires constant scrutiny and criticism . . . it is always temporary, its acceptance depending on its performance." The source of irrational authority, on the other hand, "is always power over people . . . Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built." Thus former is based upon "equality" while the latter "is by its very nature based upon inequality." [Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, pp. 9-10]




http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/1931/secB1.html

Could I have another, sir?

What gets "undone"? Classes... uneven development with giant decaying cities and a depopulated and often impoverished countryside? National fractionalization? "Religion"? "Racism"? Genocide? Great plenty bought at the expense of great misery? Alienation to the point that humans sit in folding chairs with popcorn, seemingly as uninvolved watchers while their inanimate creations appear to be the play? Read that little speech of Marx's again.

I'm not for going "back" on anything... Science, technology, logic, trashy Indian novels, air conditioning.... all remain in my world. I'm just "goin' back" on class society. Communism and primitive communism.

...and maybe we could lighten up a little on "Hummers for the masses".

Gotcha

EDIT: and for the record BP, that isn't what Marx says at all


Getting close to that mushy question of "human nature". Is exploitation inevitable given a certain level of productive capability? I'm guessing that's what you, and by proxy Marx, is saying. Ain't gonna argue that, hell, I'm sinking already, but it seems that observation makes the case for hard core primitivists.

Communism proceeds from capitalism as an economic mode of production that eliminates private property, thereby abolishing the capacity for massive individual acquisition and distributing socially requisite necessities on a need basis. The Devil is in the details of course, but we're not really ready to break out the fine-tooth comb lol

Ya got my predilection pegged, no bout a doubt it. I dunno, Anax, I've read enough now to recognise Marx's massive intellectual superiority over Bakunin, yet his heart and spirit, his faith in the masses make him impossible to deny. So in an act of futile masochism I'll go look the old feller up as I've lost all of my bookmarks recently.

Even Bakunin conceeded he agreed on the important stuff. It's the disciples that are the problem. I'm convinced they've got little in common with either. Let's defer it until we get in that tactical situation. You can go for Dinamitos and I'll go for Red Guards. Maybe there will be enough opposition so that we never get around to each other... (likely).

Seriously, bp... I wrote the narodnik thing because I just don't see the "split" in the way its been made out for the century since...

http://www.fbuch.com/images/RedGuards11b.JPG

Whoops, too late. I wholeheartedly agree, we're all on the same team, the personal problems of the principles and various hot heads not withstanding. Shit , if it gets to the point where we got time to get pissy about the vanguard party and such then the game is won, don't want to fuck with no Red Guards anyway.

...you might as well credit the invention of rock and roll to Kurt Cobain.

ura real fuckin' heretic.


umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu

Hmm

"umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"
"'I am because you are, and you are because we are"

So the "primitive" Zulus recognize the obvious, while we moderns think we are "individuals". Fuckin' brilliant.

Of course, the Zulus are "moderns" too. There ain't no such thing as a Zulu. The language of your phrase above is Xhosa...

Which means that we are stupid moderns...
.

Land

http://www.ratical.org/corporations/progress10.jpg

African Americans Bear Brunt of Subprime Crisis

U.S. economy built on slavery and genocide

By Penny Hess

12/17/07 "ICH" -- -- The subprime mortgage mess is making headlines, but what the media barely mentions is that the African Americans community is bearing the brunt of it.

Once again, bankers, brokers, lenders and even regular white working America have profited mightily and are bailed out by the government when their strategy fails. The African Americans community is used, bled dry, and then criminalized and blamed for the problem.

You have to dig to find out that, for instance, more African Americans borrowers making upwards of $100,000 a year were given subprime mortgages than were whites making under $40,000. African Americans communities were targeted for subprime and adjustable rate mortgages as a very lucrative new market for loan sharks.

Cities with large African Americans populations tell the story: Atlanta (map), Cleveland (map), Detroit, Brooklyn (map), to name a few.

Early in this decade the government and the Fed began lowering interest rates. Housing prices skyrocketed and millions of Americans began tapping into their home equity, fueling a “wealth effect,” and massive spending.

The lower rates sparked the speculative housing market and gentrification, as lower income white people could suddenly become homeowners by buying in an African community. Or they could become entrepreneurs by buying up “ugly houses” to flip.

TV channels were spawned by gentrification and a whole economy centered on Lowe’s, Home Depot, Restoration Hardware, Starbucks, art galleries and cute restaurants. Houses of African Americans, including the elderly, were taken from under them as white people demanded that code violations be enforced for their benefit.

As housing prices in African Americans neighborhoods skyrocketed, the culture of the community was criminalized and police presence intensified to protect the white “pioneers” from the surrounding impoverished population. African people were dispersed further and further into decaying suburbs, crunched in with other family members or sent to government-sponsored prison housing.

None of this is new, however. It’s the same story that has played out for more than half a millennium.

Since African human beings were first abducted at gunpoint from Africa, turned into a commodity and transported to America as well-insured cargo, stacked on pallets in the holds of ships, the Western world has gotten its economic stimulus from the oppression of others.

More than anything, America sits on the backs of Africans.

Today we talk about oil prices and fluctuations in the stock market, but there were whole centuries when the price of an African was the most important topic at businessmen’s lunches in New York and London. The Wall Street stock exchange sits on the site of New York auction blocks and slave ship docks.

The African cemetery found under a high rise building on Wall Street is the perfect metaphor for this country: America’s wealth resting literally on the bodies of African people.

As Omali Yeshitela proves in his books Omali Yeshitela Speaks and One Africa! One Nation!, Europe was a cold, barren, impoverished and war-like place in the Middle Ages. It was characterized by oppression, plague and feudal serfdom when it set out to rescue itself by ravaging Africa.

Henry the Navigator of Portugal sent ships out to the coast of West Africa around 1420, and by the year 1500 Europe had already extracted 81,000 African people and 700 tons of gold from Africa.

Around the same time Columbus began the process of massive genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas and the theft of their land and resources.

We are taught ridiculous myths that somehow Europe worked hard, saved its money and thus became the dominant economic and military power in the world. But an honest look at history shows that the development of wealth and power in Europe parallels its assault on Africa and other peoples every step of the way.

In the 1500s the Spanish government monopolized the trade in African human beings, even as the governments of Holland, England and France were waiting in the wings. They would all go to war for a piece of this most valuable commodity, just as oil wars are being fought today.

Independent businessmen also wanted some of this loot, financing their own ships as pirates or “privateers” under the banner of “free trade.” Entrepreneurs like Jean Lafitte raided the state-owned slave ships laden with human cargo and made a fortune selling Africans off the coast of New Orleans at discount rates.

As Yeshitela, again points out, the trade in African people did far more than make southern plantation owners wealthy. The plantations are long gone but the wealth of African enslavement has been compounded in the overall economy of America a million times over.

What part of Europe’s and America’s economy did not get started on the human trade? Banking, insurance, ship building, industry, universities, tourism, railroads, housing, hotels, law firms, the garment industry, retail sales, Wall Street itself were all spawned by African enslavement.

We’re taught that Africans became “free” after the official enslavement ended in 1865 in the U.S. In reality other forms of African exploitation were found to be more lucrative for the Western economy.

In Africa Europe imposed direct colonialism. There was no word for “genocide” when Europe and America were slaughtering millions of African people on the continent as they ripped out diamonds, rubber, ivory, gold, and other precious resources that further consolidated Western wealth and power.

Rarely discussed, but extremely important to America’s wealth, is the system of convict leasing. For more than 70 years thousands of African people were rounded up under Jim Crow laws, kept in work camps and leased out by state governments to plantations, limestone and phosphorus mines, road gangs and logging teams.

The brutal system of convict leasing rebuilt the economy of the southern states following the Civil War. In the late 19th century more than 80 percent of the revenue of Alabama came from convict leasing. I have read that Hitler modeled work camps on the convict leasing system, which was known to be worse than slavery. The white people’s motto was, “One dies, get another.”

European immigrants coming to America were pretty clear that American “opportunities” came to them because of African enslavement and the genocide against the Indigenous people.

Throughout most of the 19th century street gangs made up of white workers in northern cities functioned as a terrorist force against African people who had escaped to the north.

Lynching was the popular pastime of white America for a hundred years. These chilling festivals of violence had the avid participation of the whole white family. Children were dressed up and posed for photographs in front of the lifeless bodies of African people. This public torture and murder of African people was accompanied by music, dancing and food vendors.

White people terrorized Africans who were prospering in independent economic communities. Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida are only the most famous examples of this. All over the country Africans banded together, buying land and setting up collective economic ventures that were quite successful, but these were destroyed one after another. White people would never allow Africans to become more prosperous than they.

Similarly, the media tell us the reason Africa is poor today is because its leaders are “corrupt.” But every time an African leader rises up, demanding that the resources of his country benefit the people, the leader has been assassinated or overthrown by America or Europe—from Patrice Lumumba to Kwame Nkrumah to Thomas Sankara.

It’s not corruption; it’s the U.S. policy of neocolonialism, which ensures that Africa’s resources stay in the pocket of Western powers. I have read that more than 80 percent of all the mineral resources the U.S. needs to function are in Africa. This is the basis for the U.S. militarization of Africa under AFRICOM.

In this country, after the leaders of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s were assassinated or imprisoned by the government, the U.S. began flooding African communities with drugs: heroin and later crack cocaine. This is well-documented from many sources.

We cannot underestimate the importance of this illegal drug trade to the U.S. economy. Said by the United Nations to be worth more than $500 billion a year, illegal drugs constitute the third largest commodity in the world, behind oil and arms.

Clearly those billions of narco-dollars are not floating around in African communities, but rather buy the cars, mansions and private jets of the Wall Street elite. They also benefit white society as a whole. Since the late 70s drug money has funded real estate, car dealerships, jewelry stores, restaurants and more.

Meanwhile, the African community is left with a government-imposed, penny-ante illegal drug economy that primarily serves to criminalize the entire African population. The imposed drug economy feeds the prison industry, another booming component of the U.S. economy.

More than half of the 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. today are African, the cornerstone of a $50 billion industry. Called the new gold rush, the prison industry has spawned countless spin-off businesses, including phone companies, clothing, construction, vending machines, instruments of suppression and more.

Most prisons are filled with urban Africans but located in rural white America, where prisons are the third largest industry, behind gambling and pig farming. Many states have a conscious strategy to use prisons as economic stimulus for rural counties, providing white high school graduates high paying jobs as guards.

Some people are predicting that the subprime collapse along with the low dollar and high oil prices could bring about the demise of the U.S. economy.

If so, it’s just the logical conclusion of an obese, parasitic economic system that has been sitting on a shaky foundation of enslavement and genocide for more than 500 years.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e18907.htm (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18907.htm)

Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" published in McClure's Magazine, Feb. 1899

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.



Kipling insisted that the "white man" acquired imperial possessions to "serve" his "captive's needs." What, according to Kipling, were these "needs"?

4. American Holocaust

Starting from 1492, when Christopher Columbus is said to have discovered the Americas, the deadly conquest commenced. The complex civilizations of native Americans, over the next few centuries, were devastated. British historian Mark Cocker has reviewed reliable estimates of the death toll:

“[E]leven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean Empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil, the Portuguese conquest saw Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico… Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 800,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.” [Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p. 5]

Although the majority of these deaths occurred due to the impact of European diseases, disease alone does not explain the variations of death toll rates in different parts of the Americas. The key factors in which diseases operated were ultimately the kinds of repressive colonial social formations imposed on natives by European invaders, consisting of different matrices of forced labour regimes in mines and plantations, mass enslavement for personal domestic use of colonists, religious and cultural dislocation, and so on.

As David Stannard concludes in his extensive study of the genocide, which he describes as an “American Holocaust”, these factors accelerated and intensified the mere impact of disease. He further describes the colonists’ strategic thinking:

“At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion and culture and land and independence, swearing allegiance ‘as vassals’ to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown, or suffer ‘all the mischief and damage’ that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you.” [David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 255]

This binary choice, put to the Native Americans five centuries ago, bears an unnerving resemblance to the rhetoric underpinning the “War on Terror” today, “you are either with us or against us.”

5. African Holocaust

In Africa, the slave trade contributed substantially to the protracted deaths of vast numbers of people. While slave structures had already existed locally, it certainly did not exist on the vast scale it adopted in the course of European interventions. English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Danes, and Portuguese slave-traders started out by raiding villages off the West African coast. The transatlantic slave trade, lasting from the 1450s to the 1860s, consisted of “a series of exchanges of captives reaching from the interior of sub-Saharan Africa to final purchasers in the Americas.” An observer at the time, British journalist Edward Morel wrote: “For a hundred years slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death.” [The Black Man’s Burden:The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (New York: Modern Reader, 1969)]

From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high as 2 million. Although the many millions who died “in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East” is unknown, among the slaves “kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died.” Overall, in five centuries between nearly 17,000,000 - and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000 - Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade. [R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994)].

University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn has demonstrated convincingly the centrality of capitalism to the growth of new world slavery, arguing that the profits of slavery accumulated in the “triangular trade” between Europe, Africa and America contributed fundamentally to Britain’s industrialization. For instance, the profits from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation. [Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso), p. 572.] The question of capital formation, however, is only part of the story. The trans-atlantic slave trade was an indispensable motor in an emerging capitalist world system under the mantle of the British empire. The mechanization of cotton textiles, originally produced in American plantations manned by African slaves, was overwhelmingly the driving force in British industrialization. [CK Harley and NFR Crafts, “Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth”, Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (1994, no. 420)]


http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/47803

Hammering on these themes is valuable and powerful in my view:

- Exploitation of the world's resources and degradation of the environment for the benefit of the few

- Destruction of indigenous cultures and rural agricultural communities

- Racism and the role of white suburban privilege in promoting the agenda of the ruling class

- Betrayal of blue collar working class people by white collar working class people

What is the harm? What am I missing here?

...What is the basis of exploitation if accumulation can't exist? What can I do with your fish if it rots. What you wanna describe comes with "husbandry", a well chosen word. Before that, captives are killed, eaten or most often, adopted. There is so little "dissension" that the universal form of decisions is "consensus" and the most common form is everyone must agree. Didn't you read up on the councils of the Iroquois - 35000 people and unanimous agreement? Try that with any ten people in our culture. Modern forms are very recent and in every case there are centuries of nostalgia afterwards. Every effort is made to stop it - from potlatch to Theseus wiping out private property. "Democracy" is not the triumph of the Greeks - it is the ruination of the Greek gens and with them, alll that was really noble in the human condition. Classes are a recent cancer...



umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu

Hmm

"umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"
"'I am because you are, and you are because we are"

So the "primitive" Zulus recognize the obvious, while we moderns think we are "individuals". Fuckin' brilliant.

Of course, the Zulus are "moderns" too. There ain't no such thing as a Zulu. The language of your phrase above is Xhosa...

Which means that we are stupid moderns...
.

The gens. I recall posting this at PI back when and garnering a "now we're talkin'" response from Chlamor -
Karl Marx and the Iroquois (http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/marx_iroquois.html)

I was just reading some of Freddy's comments on the gens and thought it germane to too both the above link out and this one: Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm) (and the next chapter, too)

I'd perhaps say a bit more but am nursing a significant dog bite on my dominant hand, thus making the keyboard even less friendly than usual. I will ask tho, anax, do you see the nuclear family continuing into a communist future? or perhaps the arising of some latter day gens in its place and, if so, what sorta organizational basis would there bee- free association among like-minded folks - tribes of video gamers alongside tribes of political philosophers? Is the family as we now know it an impediment to a property-less future; is it part and parcel to the state somehow?

The final half or so of the Origins piece linked above:


The great majority of the American Indians did not advance to any higher form of association than the tribe. Living in small tribes, separated from one another by wide tracts between their frontiers, weakened by incessant wars, they occupied an immense territory with few people. Here and there alliances between related tribes came into being in the emergency of the moment and broke up when the emergency had passed. But in certain districts tribes which were originally related and had then been dispersed, joined together again in permanent federations, thus taking the first step towards the formation of nations. In the United States we find the most developed form of such a federation among the Iroquois. Emigrating from their homes west of the Mississippi, where they probably formed a branch of the great Dakota family, they settled after long wanderings in what is now the State of New York. They were divided into five tribes: Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks. They subsisted on fish, game, and the products of a crude horticulture, and lived in villages, which were generally protected by a stockade. Never more than twenty thousand strong, they had a number of gentes common to all the five tribes, spoke closely related dialects of the same language, and occupied a continuous stretch of territory which was divided up among the five tribes. As they had newly conquered this territory, these tribes were naturally accustomed to stand together against the Inhabitants they had driven out. From this developed, at the beginning of the fifteenth century at latest, a regular C(everlasting league," a sworn confederacy, which in the consciousness of its new strength immediately assumed an aggressive character, and at the height of its power, about 1675, conquered wide stretches of the surrounding country, either expelling the inhabitants or making them pay tribute. The Iroquois confederacy represents the most advanced social organization achieved by any Indians still at the lower stage of barbarism (excluding, therefore, the Mexicans, New Mexicans and Peruvians).

The main provisions of the confederacy were as follows:

1. Perpetual federation of the five consanguineous tribes on the basis of complete equality and independence in all internal matters of the tribe. This bond of kin represented the real basis of the confederacy. Of the five tribes, three were known as father tribes and were brother tribes to one another; the other two were known as son tribes, and were likewise brother tribes to one another. Three gentes, the oldest, still had their living representatives in all five tribes, and another three in three tribes; the members of each of these gentes were all brothers of one another throughout all the five tribes. Their common language, in which there were only variations of dialect, was the expression and the proof of their common descent.

2. The organ of the confederacy was federal council of fifty sachems, all equal in rank and authority; the decisions of this council were final in all matters relating to the confederacy.

3. The fifty sachems were distributed among the tribes and gentes at the foundation of the confederacy to hold the new offices specially created for federal purposes. They were elected by the respective gentes whenever a vacancy occurred and could be deposed by the gentes at any time; but the right of investing them with their office belonged to the federal council.

4. These federal sachems were also sachems in their respective tribes, and had a seat and a vote in the tribal council.

5. All decisions of the federal council had to be unanimous.

6. Voting was by tribes, so that for a decision to be valid every tribe and all members of the council in every tribe had to signify their agreement.

7. Each of the five tribal councils could convene the federal council, but it could not convene itself.

8. The meetings of the council were held in the presence of the assembled people; every Iroquois could speak; the council alone decided.

9. The confederacy had no official head or chief executive officer.

10. On the other hand, the council had two principal war-chiefs, with equal powers and equal authority (the two "kings" of the Spartans, the two consuls in Rome).

That was the whole public constitution under which the Iroquois lived for over four hundred years and are still living today. I have described it fully, following Morgan, because here we have the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which still has no state. The state presupposes a special public power separated from the body of the people, and Maurer, who with a true instinct recognizes that the constitution of the German mark is a purely social institution, differing essentially from the state, though later providing a great part of its basis, consequently investigates in all his writings the gradual growth of the public power out of, and side by side with, the primitive constitutions of marks, villages, homesteads, and towns. Among the North American Indians we see how an originally homogeneous tribe gradually spreads over a huge continent; how through division tribes become nations, entire groups of tribes; how the languages change until they not only become unintelligible to other tribes, but also lose almost every trace of their original identity; how at the same time within the tribes each gens splits up into several gentes, how the old mother gentes are preserved as phratries, while the names of these oldest gentes nevertheless remain the same in widely distant tribes that have long been separated-the Wolf and the Bear are still gentile names among a majority of all Indian tribes. And the constitution described above applies in the main to them all, except that many of them never advanced as far as the confederacy of related tribes.

But once the gens is given as the social unit, we also see how the whole constitution of gentes, phratries, and tribes is almost necessarily bound to develop from this unit, because the development is natural. Gens, phratry, and tribe are all groups of different degrees of consanguinity, each self-contained and ordering its own affairs, but each supplementing the other. And the affairs which fall within their sphere comprise all the public affairs of barbarians of the lower stage. When we find a people with the gens as their social unit, we may therefore also look for an organization of the tribe similar to that here described; and when there are adequate sources, as in the case of the Greeks and the Romans, we shall not only find it, but we shall also be able to convince ourselves that where the sources fail us, comparison with the American social constitution helps us over the most difficult doubts and riddles.

And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes. When, about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the Eries and the "Neutral Nation," they offered to accept them into the confederacy on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had refused that they were driven from their territory. And what men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians.

We have seen examples of this courage quite recently in Africa. The Zulus a few years ago and the Nubians a few months ago -- both of them tribes in which gentile institutions have not yet died out -- did what no European army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without firearms, under a hail of bullets from the breech-loaders of the English infantry - acknowledged the best in the world at fighting in close order -- they advanced right up to the bayonets and more than once threw the lines into disorder and even broke them, in spite of the enormous inequality of weapons and in spite of the fact that they have no military service and know nothing of drill. Their powers of endurance and performance are shown by the complaint of the English that a Kaffir travels farther and faster in twenty-four hours than a horse. His smallest muscle stands out hard and firm like whipcord, says an English painter.

That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society.

That is the one side. But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. [5] The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth -- inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means -- theft, violence, fraud, treason -- that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.

...What is the basis of exploitation if accumulation can't exist? What can I do with your fish if it rots. What you wanna describe comes with "husbandry", a well chosen word. Before that, captives are killed, eaten or most often, adopted. There is so little "dissension" that the universal form of decisions is "consensus" and the most common form is everyone must agree. Didn't you read up on the councils of the Iroquois - 35000 people and unanimous agreement? Try that with any ten people in our culture. Modern forms are very recent and in every case there are centuries of nostalgia afterwards. Every effort is made to stop it - from potlatch to Theseus wiping out private property. "Democracy" is not the triumph of the Greeks - it is the ruination of the Greek gens and with them, alll that was really noble in the human condition. Classes are a recent cancer...


[quote]umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu

Hmm

"umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu"
"'I am because you are, and you are because we are"

So the "primitive" Zulus recognize the obvious, while we moderns think we are "individuals". Fuckin' brilliant.

Of course, the Zulus are "moderns" too. There ain't no such thing as a Zulu. The language of your phrase above is Xhosa...

Which means that we are stupid moderns...
.

The gens. I recall posting this at PI back when and garnering a "now we're talkin'" response from Chlamor -
Karl Marx and the Iroquois (http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/marx_iroquois.html)

I was just reading some of Freddy's comments on the gens and thought it germane to too both the above link out and this one: Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm) (and the next chapter, too)

I'd perhaps say a bit more but am nursing a significant dog bite on my dominant hand, thus making the keyboard even less friendly than usual. I will ask tho, anax, do you see the nuclear family continuing into a communist future? or perhaps the arising of some latter day gens in its place and, if so, what sorta organizational basis would there bee- free association among like-minded folks - tribes of video gamers alongside tribes of political philosophers? Is the family as we now know it an impediment to a property-less future; is it part and parcel to the state somehow?

The final half or so of the Origins piece linked above:


The great majority of the American Indians did not advance to any higher form of association than the tribe. Living in small tribes, separated from one another by wide tracts between their frontiers, weakened by incessant wars, they occupied an immense territory with few people. Here and there alliances between related tribes came into being in the emergency of the moment and broke up when the emergency had passed. But in certain districts tribes which were originally related and had then been dispersed, joined together again in permanent federations, thus taking the first step towards the formation of nations. In the United States we find the most developed form of such a federation among the Iroquois. Emigrating from their homes west of the Mississippi, where they probably formed a branch of the great Dakota family, they settled after long wanderings in what is now the State of New York. They were divided into five tribes: Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks. They subsisted on fish, game, and the products of a crude horticulture, and lived in villages, which were generally protected by a stockade. Never more than twenty thousand strong, they had a number of gentes common to all the five tribes, spoke closely related dialects of the same language, and occupied a continuous stretch of territory which was divided up among the five tribes. As they had newly conquered this territory, these tribes were naturally accustomed to stand together against the Inhabitants they had driven out. From this developed, at the beginning of the fifteenth century at latest, a regular C(everlasting league," a sworn confederacy, which in the consciousness of its new strength immediately assumed an aggressive character, and at the height of its power, about 1675, conquered wide stretches of the surrounding country, either expelling the inhabitants or making them pay tribute. The Iroquois confederacy represents the most advanced social organization achieved by any Indians still at the lower stage of barbarism (excluding, therefore, the Mexicans, New Mexicans and Peruvians).

The main provisions of the confederacy were as follows:

1. Perpetual federation of the five consanguineous tribes on the basis of complete equality and independence in all internal matters of the tribe. This bond of kin represented the real basis of the confederacy. Of the five tribes, three were known as father tribes and were brother tribes to one another; the other two were known as son tribes, and were likewise brother tribes to one another. Three gentes, the oldest, still had their living representatives in all five tribes, and another three in three tribes; the members of each of these gentes were all brothers of one another throughout all the five tribes. Their common language, in which there were only variations of dialect, was the expression and the proof of their common descent.

2. The organ of the confederacy was federal council of fifty sachems, all equal in rank and authority; the decisions of this council were final in all matters relating to the confederacy.

3. The fifty sachems were distributed among the tribes and gentes at the foundation of the confederacy to hold the new offices specially created for federal purposes. They were elected by the respective gentes whenever a vacancy occurred and could be deposed by the gentes at any time; but the right of investing them with their office belonged to the federal council.

4. These federal sachems were also sachems in their respective tribes, and had a seat and a vote in the tribal council.

5. All decisions of the federal council had to be unanimous.

6. Voting was by tribes, so that for a decision to be valid every tribe and all members of the council in every tribe had to signify their agreement.

7. Each of the five tribal councils could convene the federal council, but it could not convene itself.

8. The meetings of the council were held in the presence of the assembled people; every Iroquois could speak; the council alone decided.

9. The confederacy had no official head or chief executive officer.

10. On the other hand, the council had two principal war-chiefs, with equal powers and equal authority (the two "kings" of the Spartans, the two consuls in Rome).

That was the whole public constitution under which the Iroquois lived for over four hundred years and are still living today. I have described it fully, following Morgan, because here we have the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which still has no state. The state presupposes a special public power separated from the body of the people, and Maurer, who with a true instinct recognizes that the constitution of the German mark is a purely social institution, differing essentially from the state, though later providing a great part of its basis, consequently investigates in all his writings the gradual growth of the public power out of, and side by side with, the primitive constitutions of marks, villages, homesteads, and towns. Among the North American Indians we see how an originally homogeneous tribe gradually spreads over a huge continent; how through division tribes become nations, entire groups of tribes; how the languages change until they not only become unintelligible to other tribes, but also lose almost every trace of their original identity; how at the same time within the tribes each gens splits up into several gentes, how the old mother gentes are preserved as phratries, while the names of these oldest gentes nevertheless remain the same in widely distant tribes that have long been separated-the Wolf and the Bear are still gentile names among a majority of all Indian tribes. And the constitution described above applies in the main to them all, except that many of them never advanced as far as the confederacy of related tribes.

But once the gens is given as the social unit, we also see how the whole constitution of gentes, phratries, and tribes is almost necessarily bound to develop from this unit, because the development is natural. Gens, phratry, and tribe are all groups of different degrees of consanguinity, each self-contained and ordering its own affairs, but each supplementing the other. And the affairs which fall within their sphere comprise all the public affairs of barbarians of the lower stage. When we find a people with the gens as their social unit, we may therefore also look for an organization of the tribe similar to that here described; and when there are adequate sources, as in the case of the Greeks and the Romans, we shall not only find it, but we shall also be able to convince ourselves that where the sources fail us, comparison with the American social constitution helps us over the most difficult doubts and riddles.

And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes. When, about the year 1651, the Iroquois had conquered the Eries and the "Neutral Nation," they offered to accept them into the confederacy on equal terms; it was only after the defeated tribes had refused that they were driven from their territory. And what men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians.

We have seen examples of this courage quite recently in Africa. The Zulus a few years ago and the Nubians a few months ago -- both of them tribes in which gentile institutions have not yet died out -- did what no European army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without firearms, under a hail of bullets from the breech-loaders of the English infantry - acknowledged the best in the world at fighting in close order -- they advanced right up to the bayonets and more than once threw the lines into disorder and even broke them, in spite of the enormous inequality of weapons and in spite of the fact that they have no military service and know nothing of drill. Their powers of endurance and performance are shown by the complaint of the English that a Kaffir travels farther and faster in twenty-four hours than a horse. His smallest muscle stands out hard and firm like whipcord, says an English painter.

That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society.

That is the one side. But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. [5] The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth -- inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means -- theft, violence, fraud, treason -- that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.
[/quote:1b83utch]

You sure did pick out the right quote. The above, to use old language, blows my mind. This is the basis of my fundamental agreement with chlamor. All of it is in this small passage. The two sides are (in reference to the Zulus):

"That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society."

which couldn't be more accurate... this is what we have lost.

And then Fred immediately reminds us that it was all doomed to "evolve" away. Can't be recaptured as it was but must be on a new level. This may sound naive but the history of the birth of all civilizations is that of "nostalgia", often lasting for centuries, for what has invariably been lost. Class society releases the great productive germ slumbering in the human animal but does so at the price of our "soul".

Nah, I think pairing marriage is doomed alongside all the other superstructural elements of class society... but it will take a while.
.

You sure did pick out the right quote. The above, to use old language, blows my mind. This is the basis of my fundamental agreement with chlamor. All of it is in this small passage. The two sides are (in reference to the Zulus):

"That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society."

which couldn't be more accurate... this is what we have lost.

And then Fred immediately reminds us that it was all doomed to "evolve" away. Can't be recaptured as it was but must be on a new level. This may sound naive but the history of the birth of all civilizations is that of "nostalgia", often lasting for centuries, for what has invariably been lost. Class society releases the great productive germ slumbering in the human animal but does so at the price of our "soul".

Nah, I think pairing marriage is doomed alongside all the other superstructural elements of class society... but it will take a while.
.

So, in the short that is a crushed hand, Howard Roark was not a mere fraud, but rather, was stolen as well...good to know. Very good in fact.

You sure did pick out the right quote. The above, to use old language, blows my mind. This is the basis of my fundamental agreement with chlamor. All of it is in this small passage. The two sides are (in reference to the Zulus):

"That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society."

which couldn't be more accurate... this is what we have lost.

And then Fred immediately reminds us that it was all doomed to "evolve" away. Can't be recaptured as it was but must be on a new level. This may sound naive but the history of the birth of all civilizations is that of "nostalgia", often lasting for centuries, for what has invariably been lost. Class society releases the great productive germ slumbering in the human animal but does so at the price of our "soul".

Nah, I think pairing marriage is doomed alongside all the other superstructural elements of class society... but it will take a while.
.

So, in the short that is a crushed hand, Howard Roark was not a mere fraud, but rather, was stolen as well...good to know. Very good in fact.

You lost me, what is the connection to Anax's comment here?

You sure did pick out the right quote. The above, to use old language, blows my mind. This is the basis of my fundamental agreement with chlamor. All of it is in this small passage. The two sides are (in reference to the Zulus):

"That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society."

which couldn't be more accurate... this is what we have lost.

And then Fred immediately reminds us that it was all doomed to "evolve" away. Can't be recaptured as it was but must be on a new level. This may sound naive but the history of the birth of all civilizations is that of "nostalgia", often lasting for centuries, for what has invariably been lost. Class society releases the great productive germ slumbering in the human animal but does so at the price of our "soul".

Nah, I think pairing marriage is doomed alongside all the other superstructural elements of class society... but it will take a while.
.

So, in the short that is a crushed hand, Howard Roark was not a mere fraud, but rather, was stolen as well...good to know. Very good in fact.

You lost me, what is the connection to Anax's comment here?

Roarke is the "hero" of Fountainhead. Rusty is saying that all of the Randian (Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative. Modern, Post-Modern) literature consists of nothing but dime store references to the great works of Socialism. It is interesting that this same thing was said of the Enlightenment's European literature with respect to the Greeks. The mid-nineteenth century socialist literature is said to occupy a similar significance, and not just by sycophants. After nearly 40 years of this shit, I have to agree.
.

You sure did pick out the right quote. The above, to use old language, blows my mind. This is the basis of my fundamental agreement with chlamor. All of it is in this small passage. The two sides are (in reference to the Zulus):

"That is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and small peasant from the free member of the old gentile society."

which couldn't be more accurate... this is what we have lost.

And then Fred immediately reminds us that it was all doomed to "evolve" away. Can't be recaptured as it was but must be on a new level. This may sound naive but the history of the birth of all civilizations is that of "nostalgia", often lasting for centuries, for what has invariably been lost. Class society releases the great productive germ slumbering in the human animal but does so at the price of our "soul".

Nah, I think pairing marriage is doomed alongside all the other superstructural elements of class society... but it will take a while.
.

So, in the short that is a crushed hand, Howard Roark was not a mere fraud, but rather, was stolen as well...good to know. Very good in fact.

You lost me, what is the connection to Anax's comment here?

Roarke is the "hero" of [b]Fountainhead[/i]. Rusty is saying that all of the Randian (Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative. Modern, Post-Modern) literature consists of nothing but dime store references to the great works of Socialism. It is interesting that this same thing was said of the Enlightenment's European literature with respect to the Greeks. The mid-nineteenth century socialist literature is said to occupy a similar significance, and not just by sycophants. After nearly 40 years of this shit, I have to agree.
.

Yeah I figured it out belatedly, Rusty is reviving old threads and I was locked in on only the current comment

Roarke is the "hero" of Fountainhead. Rusty is saying that all of the Randian (Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative. Modern, Post-Modern) literature consists of nothing but dime store references to the great works of Socialism. It is interesting that this same thing was said of the Enlightenment's European literature with respect to the Greeks. The mid-nineteenth century socialist literature is said to occupy a similar significance, and not just by sycophants. After nearly 40 years of this shit, I have to agree.

I couldn't agree more! I find a lot of libertarians,especially the "left" kind,are merely a bunch pseudosocialists,who want to play lip service to socialism,and not give up any of their wealth.

Roarke is the "hero" of Fountainhead. Rusty is saying that all of the Randian (Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative. Modern, Post-Modern) literature consists of nothing but dime store references to the great works of Socialism. It is interesting that this same thing was said of the Enlightenment's European literature with respect to the Greeks. The mid-nineteenth century socialist literature is said to occupy a similar significance, and not just by sycophants. After nearly 40 years of this shit, I have to agree.

I couldn't agree more! I find a lot of libertarians,especially the "left" kind,are merely a bunch pseudosocialists,who want to play lip service to socialism,and not give up any of their wealth.

Just as philosophy is said to have died with Hegel, political science seems to have died with Marx. To expand on the simple idea above, eattherich, consider Rome. What were the great "works" of this most powerful of empires? Where is the Roman system written down? Where stands the ringing defense of the Roman politic? Oh, it exists, perhaps even to excess but nothing notable until the Empire itself teeters on the edge of extinction. Otherwise, it is not the truimphant Romans but the defeated Greeks whose works triumph, even among the Romans. The same goes for literature, poetry, theater, and much of the Arts. In almost every case, the Romans distribute, comment on, and reproduce but don't come close to matching what came before. Even in the exception, as with the birth of Virgil, the instances come at the dawn of the Empire and even so as only a faint echo of Homer.

So too, with capitalism... Who is the great defender of the scheme as a whole? Where is the titanic masterwork in its epic glorification written in the last 50 years? 100 years? 150 years? Where anything of that stature exists, it is in criticism and not in adulation of that most triumphant of political forms. When was the last "great" defender of Liberalism? Was it J.S. Mill? How about Conservatism? Whom since Hume? Was it Churchill with his one-liners... trite, even in comparison to Henny Youngman?

I am aware of the zeal of your recent unconversion, eats, and don't wish to rub salt in new wounds, but consider the "libertarians" apart from their alternating criticism and emulation of socialism. The following is von Mises from Socialism proving that he can compete with any drunken Vienna shopkeeper in the banality, superficiality, and venality of his "views":


Democracy is self-government of the people; it is autonomy. But this does not mean that all must collaborate equally in legislation and administration. Direct democracy can be realized only on the smallest scale. Even small parliaments cannot do all their work in plenary assemblies; committees must be chosen, and the real work is done by individuals; by the proposers, the speakers, the rapporteurs, and above all by the authors of the bills. Here then is final proof of the fact that the masses follow the leadership of a few men. That men are not all equal, that some are born to lead and some to be led is a circumstance which even democratic institutions cannot alter. We cannot all be pioneers: most people do not wish to be nor have they the necessary strength. The idea that under the purest form of democracy people would spend their days in council like the members of a parliament derives from the conception we had of the ancient Greek city State at its period of decay; but we overlook the fact that such communities were not in fact democracies at all, since they excluded from public life the slaves and all who did not possess full citizen rights. Where all are to collaborate, the "pure" ideal of direct democracy becomes impracticable. To want to see democracy realized in this impossible form is nothing less than pedantic natural law doctrinairianism.

The truth is that the significance of the democratic form of constitution is something quite different from all this. Its function is to make peace, to avoid violent revolutions. In non-democratic states, too, only a government which can count on the backing of public opinion is able to maintain itself in the long run. The strength of all governments lies not in weapons but in the spirit which puts the weapons at their disposal. Those in power, always necessarily a small minority against an enormous majority, can attain and maintain power only by making the spirit of the majority pliant to their rule.

...any violent revolution costs blood and money. Lives are sacrificed, and destruction impedes economic activity. Democracy tries to prevent such material loss and the accompanying psychical shock by guaranteeing accord between the will of the state—as expressed through the organs of the state—and the will of the majority. This it achieves by making the organs of the state legally dependent on the will of the majority of the moment. In internal policy it realizes what pacifism seeks to realize in external policy.

That this alone is the decisive function of democracy becomes clearly evident when we consider the argument which opponents of the democratic principle most frequently adduce against it. The Russian conservative is undoubtedly right when he points out that Russian Tsarism and the policy of the Tsar was approved by the great mass of the Russian people, so that even a democratic state form could not have given Russia a different system of government. Russian democrats themselves have had no delusions about this. As long as the majority of the Russian people or, better, of that part of the people which was politically mature and which had the opportunity to intervene in policy—as long as this majority stood behind tsardom, the empire did not suffer from the absence of a democratic form of constitution.

It is not the cynicism of this ass-hole that is striking but the mock profundity of a fifth-rate cynic. And this guy was famous? Couldn't they do better?
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Just as philosophy is said to have died with Hegel, political science seems to have died with Marx. To expand on the simple idea above, eattherich, consider Rome. What were the great "works" of this most powerful of empires? Where is the Roman system written down? Where stands the ringing defense of the Roman politic? Oh, it exists, perhaps even to excess but nothing notable until the Empire itself teeters on the edge of extinction. Otherwise, it is not the truimphant Romans but the defeated Greeks whose works triumph, even among the Romans. The same goes for literature, poetry, theater, and much of the Arts. In almost every case, the Romans distribute, comment on, and reproduce but don't come close to matching what came before. Even in the exception, as with the birth of Virgil, the instances come at the dawn of the Empire and even so as only a faint echo of Homer.

I find that really interesting, Anax, another connection of our society with evil old Rome. Is this the blanality or mediocrity of utility, or something else?

I recall somewhere reading or hearing that our civilization peaked in the Victorian period, have no idea who said it or what ax was being ground. Seems that agrees, to some degree, with what you're saying here.

Can we ever be free of those toga draped hustlers?

Just as philosophy is said to have died with Hegel, political science seems to have died with Marx. To expand on the simple idea above, eattherich, consider Rome. What were the great "works" of this most powerful of empires? Where is the Roman system written down? Where stands the ringing defense of the Roman politic? Oh, it exists, perhaps even to excess but nothing notable until the Empire itself teeters on the edge of extinction. Otherwise, it is not the truimphant Romans but the defeated Greeks whose works triumph, even among the Romans. The same goes for literature, poetry, theater, and much of the Arts. In almost every case, the Romans distribute, comment on, and reproduce but don't come close to matching what came before. Even in the exception, as with the birth of Virgil, the instances come at the dawn of the Empire and even so as only a faint echo of Homer.

I find that really interesting, Anax, another connection of our society with evil old Rome. Is this the blanality or mediocrity of utility, or something else?

I recall somewhere reading or hearing that our civilization peaked in the Victorian period, have no idea who said it or what ax was being ground. Seems that agrees, to some degree, with what you're saying here.

Can we ever be free of those toga draped hustlers?

I don't know, bp. It astonished me the first time that I thought about it and I have never really seen anyone crank a "theory" out of it, except tangentially, as you say. I guess you could argue that it is subjective but it sure is dramatic. The bankruptcy of the Roman political culture (and not just political) is kinda obvious and matched only by the gossamer thinness of our own. Like ours, theirs was a literature which simply repeated assertions and the hollowest of platitudes with no semblence of the greatness that came just before. Hollow legions?

http://www.lore-and-saga.co.uk/assets/images/Legion1.JPG