Re: Transformation from War to Peace

Pat puts his finger on the point: as a "state" project.  This why disagreement 
is not dishonest.  (But to be more accurate, I should have picked the phrase 
"similar ideals" rather than "similar goals.")  Above all, "Communism" will 
never regain legitimacy because historical communism, as a state development 
project, did not and could not live up its promises and because, as a state 
development project within a world-system, it degenerated.

Elson E. Boles
Assistant Professor
Sociology
Saginaw Valley State University


>>> pat lauderdale <pat.lauderdale@asu.edu> 04/16/03 01:37PM >>>
I agree, at least, as a 'state' project.  And, the comment below about the 
'wrath of nature' seems dangerous to me but I'll only respond to you for now 
[since
I said that it was time for me to listen to the wsn group].  As you know, women 
[and many poor people] were defined as nature that had to be controlled and
the negative view of nature was touted by Hobbes and his followers.  
Traditional indigneous peoples, for the most part, view themselves and nature 
as one.
Paula Gunn Allen and Vine Deloria, Jr., have been explicating that position for
years.                                                                          
                                                                       Elson
Boles wrote:

> Communism is dead.  World development will go by another name and another 
>program.  The sooner this is recognized by those with similar goals, the 
>better.
>
> Elson
>
> Elson E. Boles
> Assistant Professor
> Sociology
> Saginaw Valley State University
>
> >>> <wwagar@binghamton.edu> 04/15/03 07:23PM >>>
>
>         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