Re: Transformation from War to Peace

        To put this thread in a Marxian context, I think we need to bear
in mind the following:

        1.  The future achievement of a communist society will, in great
measure, restore the organicity and egalitarianism of prehistoric
communism, as exemplified by the lives of many indigenous North Americans
before the European conquest.  Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and
parts of Central and South America also practiced primitive communism, but
in the case of pre-Columbian imperial Peru, Mexico, and the realm of the
Mayans, the exploitative institutions of early "civilization" had already
been independently invented, enabling Spanish Conquistadores to take the
place of the indigenous power elites and continue the exploitation of
peasant masses without missing a beat.  Recall the great influence of the
work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, an honorary member
of the Seneca Nation, on Friedrich Engels in his classic study, THE ORIGIN
OF THE FAMILY.

        2.  All early, middle, and late "civilizations" in all parts of
the world during the past 6,000 years have exploited rural and urban
masses mercilessly, enabling their elites to amass immense wealth and
almost total political control, whatever the specific system of social
relations of production.  To single out the "West" as the center of this
evil is historically preposterous.  To discriminate among emperors,
shoguns, maharajahs, sultans, tsars, and presidents of republics is
historically preposterous.  Late 19th- and 20th-Century Western power
elites have been shrewd enough to allow subtantial crumbs from their
tables to reach the middling ranks of their own populations, tempering
discontent almost entirely at the expense of the laboring poor of
neo-colonized non-Western societies, but the name of the game is
unchanged.  The game in all such civilizations, no matter which religious
narcotic is peddled by the elites, no matter whether the underdogs are
called slaves, serfs, or proletarians, is simple:  return to the masses
enough of the value of their labor to keep them alive and tolerably
content and able to reproduce, and keep the rest for our exalted selves.

        3.  The single greatest change over the past couple of hundred
years has been the application of empirical science and rationality by
selected Western countries and Asian emulators to increase manyfold the
total wealth of nations, allowing more crumbs to fall from certain tables,
allowing the Western innovators and Asian emulators to incorporate the
whole planet into their world-system, and, for example, allowing smug
privileged assholes from Texas to take possession of various ancient
Middle Eastern countries at gun-point.

        4.  The state of pure communism envisaged by Marx and Engels is
not a return to the Iroquois Confederacy, but a wholly new world order
wrested from the power elites of "civilization" by the working people of
all nations.  It will restore the organicity and egalitarianism of
prehistory, but at a new and higher level of mastery of the forces of
nature through the enlightened application of empirical science and
rationality.  Many of the essential elements of that higher science and
rationality were discovered long before the rise of the modern Eurocentric
world-system, discovered by scientists and philosophers of the ancient
Egyptian, Greek, Arab, Chinese, Indian, and other civilizations.
Europeans and their American offspring merely carried their work forward
to its logical conclusion.  The fact that the latest gang of usurpers, who
happen to be mostly Westerners, harnessed some of the fruits of their
labors to give us Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulag, the Pentagon, and the
RAND Corporation does not invalidate science and rationality.  We have the
tools now, thanks to the progress of science and rationality, to create a
global paradise preserving the biosphere, safeguarding everyone from
the wrath of nature, distributing all wealth equitably, and entrusting
planetary governance to the free choice of all women and men everywhere.
We can all live to the century mark in peace and well-being.  The means
are ready at hand.

        All we need is the Revolution.

        Warren