As a person who would certainly be dead without modern medicine, I always find it off-putting when people decry scientific thinking and technology as “defying the natural order of all things,” as if I was fated to die and my continued existence is merely some aberration.
I’ve got cystic fibrosis so anprims get the wall, but I don’t think Amerindian skepticism about Western science and medicine is off base. Given that native peoples in the United States have been forcibly sterilized, experimented on for the sake of science with live-virus vaccines that often have blowback, condescended to and called “savages” by racial science and phrenology etc etc it’d be ridiculous not to look at modern medicine with a skeptical eye. As I explain in my other comment here, the primary contention is with the idea that modern medicine is “progress” when that very modern medicine has been weaponized against native peoples of the United States and therefore has not resulted in “progress” for them in the slightest.
Western scientific thinking and modern medicine are neither the whole of scientific and medicinal practice nor incompatible with indigenous/traditional practice. We don’t need to abandon scientific advancements that we’ve already made, but we definitely need to rethink how we conceive of “progress” or we descend into scientism which is just colonialism with a “rational” face on it. Exploitation and culture erasure is not a prerequisite for medicine.
We, who? Because I have no desire to mistake moving away from systems of life that give each human greater capacity to seek and achieve joy and towards bizarre forms of unnecessary spirtualism for the sake of tradition for a good thing.
If you think capitalist modernity is a system of life that gives each human greater capacity to seek and achieve joy then I have a bridge to sell you. The relative improvements in quality of life seen in the imperial core were built on the blood of indigenous peoples. The entire “developing” world is daily exploited and ravaged to support this QOL. Calling our world “progress” makes sense for some groups, especially if you’re in a settler colony, but it is downright insulting to label our world as “progress” to an Amerindian. Rethinking what “progress” means is evaluating what that idea is and how to call modernity “progress” is to whitewash the genocide and slavery that world is built on.
Jesus christ he’s not saying medicine and science bad, holy fuck way to dunk on him with your medical conditions.
“Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist society.”
“Distilled to its basic terms, European faith–including the new faith in science–equals a belief that man is God.”
“All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things.”
Can confirm. I am a scientist, and I feel like a god on occasion. I highly recommend it.
Thanks for posting this, a really fascinating article. I think the tension between indigenous peoples (and to extent the black radical tradition) and Marxism is the Western conception of “progress.” Marxism, as Russell Means points out, is built upon the Western intellectual tradition which accepts the idea that “progress” and all that that entails is something desirable, good, and in a lot of ways inevitable. “A better world is possible” is an inherently progressive statement. Marxism seeks to improve on an already existing system. Remember, Marx always said that capitalism was necessary for communism to exist. Socialism, communism, etc are all later “stages” of economic development, or progress.
From the view of native peoples, capitalism itself should have never been allowed to exist, for colonialism and capitalism have been truly disastrous for Amerindians. They watched their entire world get murdered by Europeans. So for them to accept that capitalism is a necessary stage that we must build upon and move beyond is, understandably, a bridge too far. Likewise, there’s the contention that history is “progressive.” For Amerindians, quite frankly, it’s not. If anything, their history is regressive—their entire civilization was basically swept off the earth, and all the environments they grew up with destroyed and distorted by the invisible hand of the market. To claim that the arc of the world bends towards progress to an Amerindian is tantamount to laughing in their face. So when they encounter a philosophy like Marxism, which claims that it will “progress” the world, they are rightfully skeptical. This is not an unbridgeable gap, but as a white Marxist in the United States, I don’t think I’m going to be the one to do it.
I feel that the connection between Marxism and a return to what we would consider spiritualism is something that isn’t really discussed that often outside liberation theology.
He has a point about Marxism being a continuation of the mathematical, ordered, capitalist mindset. It is. It’s something born in response to that system, so it has to describe itself in those terms. Capitalism had stripped the natural world of its wonder and enchantment in favor of currency.
I think this essay does a good job of bringing his ideas in with Marxist thought.
And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. **I don’t care if it’s only a handful living high in the Andes. **
Yeah that is not how global heating works, or pandemics which have hit first peoples very hard worldwide, and I think the first people’s being wiped out in the process would care, so 40 years later I think he’s been proven wrong.
Also Marxism is Alien but Anarchism isn’t?
I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in general. I don’t believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song.
China is the only remaining ML superpower, are they also part of the ‘European intellectual tradition’?
‘Some of us will survive in the hills’ is just anarchist wishful thinking, if thats the best place to survive they will be taken over by organized states. You can’t fight organization with desorganization.
I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people.
I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. It’s the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time.
The very idea of “superpowers” is an artifact of the European intellectual tradition, so yes.
I was responding to “Also Marxism is Alien but Anarchism isn’t?”, not doing analysis. To your point, though, “useful” is a matter of cultural context (as are “truth” and “morality”), and I think that’s a significant point of the article. There is tension between Marxist analysis and indigenous analysis precisely because the former is couched in the language and memes of Eurocapitalism.
False. Pandemics have been periodically hitting first peoples since first contact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Syndrome
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/420.html
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/645.html
As the world has been made smaller by modernity and destruction of nature, this will only increase.
Native peoples in villages across the U.S., including the territories of Hawai‘i and Alaska, sustain staggering death rates. Some communities lose almost all of their residents.
In November at the Iñupiat village of Brevig Mission, Alaska, 72 of the 80 Iñupiat residents die of Spanish Influenza in five days
At Ketchikan, 74 cases of polio are reported to the Alaska Department of Health. The Tsimshian tribe located 15 miles south of Ketchikan is also affected, in communities such as Metlakatla, Alaska. Tribal leaders say that polio vaccine did not reach the community soon enough.
There is a lot to consider on and reflect. And I agree with some parts. I definitely see where he is coming from. Some of his analysis is lacking, I mean Murray Bookchin and other eco-socialists have sprouted as the challenge of Climate Change and the pollution and destruction of land in the industrialized world has turned out to be an issue whether the country was Capitalist or Socialist.
I’d think we need to assimilate this criticism and find ways to include and improve our scientific socialism, in a way that advances not just the toiling “European-minded” masses, but everyone else. In a way, they feel comfortable. For example, one of the things that made me really happy reading about the October Revolution was how they immediately recognized all these ethnic minorities, and their self-determination. It sucks that they ended up settling the “National Question” the wrong way, and hopefully we’d learn from that.
I think Humanization of the de-humanized is part of liberation; we can’t proceed successfully without it.
