Two Myths That Keep The World Poor

[Jcrowley]

"A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor," he
writes, then adding: "The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much
of the world was left far behind."

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have
been "left behind"; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth
accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken
from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India's rich
textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the
genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the
Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or
North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and
markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

Two of the great economic myths of our time allow people to deny this
intimate link, and spread misconceptions about what poverty is.
First, the destruction of nature and of people's ability to look after
themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but
on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental
destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth
is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline
that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of
Sachs¹ analysis.

The second myth is an assumption that if you consume what you produce, you
do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own
food, and do not sell it, then it doesn't contribute to GDP, and therefore
does not contribute towards "growth".

<snip>

Yet sustenance living, which the wealthy West perceives as poverty, does not
necessarily mean a low quality of life. On the contrary, by their very
nature economies based on sustenance ensure a high quality of life measured
in terms of access to good food and water, opportunities for sustainable
livelihoods, robust social and cultural identity, and a sense of
meaning in people's lives . Because these poor don't share in the perceived
benefits of economic growth, however, they are portrayed as those "left
behind".

http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/shiva112305.cfm

[nam78_two]

1. k&r.nt

[Cleita]

2. Yes, it's time to start dispelling a lot of myths that have taken

hold of our national consciousness.

K&R

[bobbolink]

3. Happily giving vote #5!

Another fine article you've brought us, Jcrowley!

:applause:

[nosmokes]

4. she hits the nail on the head ,as usual! K&R!

what good is spending time w/your family, or lolling about w/ a book of poetry or something as equally useless? hell no, to have worth you must produce but more importantly you must consume! it's just such a perverted view of things. muti-tasking. if the task is worth doing doesn't it deserve our full attention? fast food. a total aberration. food is supposed to be savored, and enjoyed in the company of others. not mas produced and eaten out of a paper that's been coated w/ a cancer causing substance as you speeed down the hiway trying not to drip mustard on your lap and drive up the backside of the car in front of you.

we hafta put our feets down and decide on what's really important, and it's not always money. but it sure starts w/ getting the green stuff redirected.

[Selatius]

5. It's an ugly truth few in the industrialized world are willing to accept.

Especially in an environment of materialism.

[bobbolink]

6. I would also posit that many who are living "sustenance" are more

"civilized", and have a much better value system.

Many fitting that description are much more advanced philosophically and spiritually.

[Jcrowley]

7. Yes

The Enlightenment, Colonialism and Race

The very first museum was said to have been founded in third century Alexandria and destroyed 600 years later, and the next significant development was not until the Renaissance when, in fifteenth century Florence the word 'museum' was used to describe the Medici collection and gallery. <3> The great changes in European thinking over the next three hundred years led into what became known as the Enlightenment. In eighteenth century Europe the Enlightenment project had shaped notions of difference and 'race'. As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze noted,


the Enlightenment's declaration of itself as 'the Age of Reason' was predicated upon precisely the assumption that reason could historically only come to maturity in modern Europe, while the inhabitants of areas outside Europe, who were considered to be of non-European racial and cultural origins, were consistently described and theorized as rationally inferior and savage. <4>

Whilst ideas of 'difference' can be found long before the Enlightenment, in Greek philosophy and Medieval art and literature, Goldberg argues that these early beliefs and images 'furnished models that modern racism would assume and transform according to its own lights'.<5> From the Enlightenment project emerged a theory of knowledge called empiricism and the 'scientific paradigm of positivism', which involves ideas on how humans can examine and understand the natural world. Linda Tuhiwai Smith says that this 'understanding' was viewed as being akin to measuring,<6> thus institutionalizing an obsession with measurement, classification, and 'knowing'. As Smith points out, the theories and ideas of the West are,


underpinned by a cultural system of classification and representation, by views about human nature, human morality and virtue, by conceptions of space and time, by conceptions of gender and race. <7>

The eighteenth century saw the development of race consciousness as the colonizers became more familiar with the colonized, and Eze reminds us that, 'Enlightenment philosophy was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular perceptions of the human race'.<8> Roberts says of the Enlightenment that its greatest political importance lay in its legacies to the future, and that the 18th century was thought to have, '… not merely to have invented earthly happiness as a feasible goal but also the thought that it could be measured and it could be promoted through the exercise of reason. Those ideas all had profound political implications.'<9>

http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_3.html

[GumboYaYa]

49. Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel?

In that book, the author notes that the "primitive" societies in which he has lived have shorter life spans, are more likely to die of homicide and have far worse healthcare, but those societies also tend to have much better social networks, community support and interpersonal relationships.

[bobbolink]

51. Thanks for the recommendation! However, I would question the healthcare

assertion.

I think a lot of "primitive" cultures have been quite knowledgeable when it comes to health, and probably have better health than the US.

I'm sure there is a wide variability.

Definitely the networds and support are often better. Sometimes there is a price--such as the narrowness of what is accepted individually. That's one reason I'm interested in Native American societies. They certainly "take care of their own", but often also accept quite a wide variety of difference among citizens. There seems to be a lot of respect.

Thanks for the suggestion... I'll look for it. :thumbsup:

[SanCristobal]

8. Does anyone else see a serious problem with this reasoning?

The biggest reason the global south is poor is bad governance. Blaming colonial legacies is a tactic these states use to cast blame off themselves and avoid solving problems. The real problems faced by these states are largely their own making; lack of political freedoms, overbearing and entrenched governments and massive corruption and red tape. All these things come together to stifle economic growth.

There are other reasons and certainly colonialism is ranked among them. European (and to a lesser extent, American) domination of the south resulted in ethnic divides, cultural inferiority complexes and nonsensical state boundaries. However one can also argue it created positive benefits, such as a buildup of infrastructure and basic western legal and educational systems (I don't personally believe the positives come close to outweighing the negatives, but playing devils advocate requires I mention the argument). Either way, most of the Wests colonial possessions gained their independence by the mid 20th century. If the colonial experience was the largest cause of southern troubles, 50 years should have been time enough to make things right.

The problem is too many people, the author of the OP included, did not learn the most important lesson of the colonial era: governments that exist primarily to preserve their own power will rarely improve the lives of those they rule over. This was as true of European colonial administrations as it is of many of the governments that have come to take their places.

[Jcrowley]

9. What you might wish to do

is take the time to deeply examine who these governments are, who are in the positions of power and how they got there. Now that's just one aspect of it.

The deeper point you've missed entirely. The definitions of poverty are laden within the constructs of colonialism and it's acolytes as are the definitions of wealth. Those misguided parameters have not gone away it is just called "Development" or Globalization" or some such tripe. It's the same old story, colossal banditry from the Civilized class.

Those governments that have "come to take their places" did no such thing. We needn't go over the laundry list of installed puppets and proxies.

Colonialism is not just some historical artifact it is with us every day.

Now of course very few of these colonized gained their independence and those that did were quickly absorbed by the economic order as mandated by The West and enforced by it's institutions and/or military. If they did not accept the good graces to accept the leader they would get to elect matters would get very ugly very soon.

The article is spot on.

[SanCristobal]

10. The article is a smoke and mirror apologist piece.

The definition of poverty is very simple and straight forward; a situation in which a person lacks the means to provide an adequate lifestyle. Although the comparative definition between the developed and developing worlds poor is somewhat drastic (the difference between not getting enough food and not getting a Wii for Christmas), we can probably agree that people lacking proper nutrition, shelter, education, and health care are impoverished.

Unfortunately the global south is full of such people. Finding the reason for this is an important step in determining how to end the problem. Mindset can't change anything, pretending the poor aren't so bad off because of "spiritual wealth" or other unmeasured resources doesn't change the fact that many still die of easily curable illnesses. Likewise colonialism can only show so much. Virtually the whole world was colonized by Europe, yet some former colonies have excelled while others are still mired in crushing poverty.

The US is the ultimate colonial success story, having gone from a (semi)oppressed colony to the worlds sole superpower. Arguably the US had a far kinder colonial experience then most of its brethren, as it had a great deal of self rule and very little of the prejudice that characterized most colonial states. However if those reasons explain away US success, then what is the cause of the Asian Tigers phenomenal growth and wealth? All experienced the deeply racist form of colonial rule, yet they have managed to rival their former masters in wealth and power.

The common factor that sets these nations apart from other ex-colonial powers is good governance. While these governments have their share of missteps they general they act according to the proven formula that leads to overall prosperity; the protection of civil liberties and private property.

This is far from the norm in the developing world. Many governments are eager to rewrite the law on a whim, if not outright ignore it if they think it will improve their power. The basic rule of law citizens of the global north take for granted is often questionable at best, and when established it is far to easily knocked down.

Western meddling can explain some of this. Certainly the developed world has a history of supporting friendly regimes regardless of their politics, and powerful business interests hold much sway over weak governments. But just as many southern nations scorn the west and are beholden to tribal loyalties, military ties, or some other form of corruption. This isn't the legacy of colonialism, it is the legacy of any unchecked government. Shifting the blame elsewhere solves nothing, it just takes pressure of these regimes to reform or disappear.

[nosmokes]

11. an apologist piece? 50 years should be enough to make up for the total

destruction of familiees, religions, languages. cultures entire ways of life for millenia and after 50 fucking years, even though they still don't own anything, according to you they're supposed to have sucked it up and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps? what a moran.

[Karenina]

15. Indeed.

Many raised in industrial cultures have a very skewed perception of what "wealth" is. When competition replaces cooperation, the zero-sum game diminishes everyone. When artificial ecomonic constructs, entertainment machines, industrialization and bling produce a poisoned environment becoming substitutes for healthy bodies, a sense of shared community and self-worth, I dare say those who participate are the truly poverty-stricken. The most ironic thing is they don't even know it...

[SanCristobal]

17. Mercantilism died a century ago,

and winner take all economics died with it. Capitalism isn't a zero sum game, Ricardo proved that with comparative advantage. Everyone involved in the process gets lifted up. The problem is getting everyone involved in the process, which bad governments don't do.

Pretending someone isn't poor or that poverty is some obscure abstract concept is ridiculous. Poverty is a very real and measurable thing; if someone can't feed, shelter, educate or provide health care for themself or their family they are poor. Go ask some Indians working tech support if they would rather loose their jobs and go back to a "spiritually fulfilling" subsistence life like their ancestors might have lived. I'm willing to bet on their answer.

[pdrichards114]

21. I beg to differ.

You said "Capitalism isn't a zero sum game, Ricardo proved that with comparative advantage."

This only holds and is only a valid conclusion when capital and labor are immobile!

[Selatius]

37. The problem is "capital" is rather mobile compared to labor.

That's the reason why hundreds of thousands of workers in the manufacturing sector have lost jobs. Their employers liquidated them and decided paying workers in the third world 50 cents an hour was the better alternative. Workers on both sides lose.

[hfojvt]

12. you over-state on the Asian tigers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita

I do not see many on that list who are rivaling France or Britain. Hong Kong and Singapore are city-states and thus they escape the poverty of rural areas and raw material production. South Korea got some help by a massive investment of US military and Taiwan the same way probably got alot of aid while Vietnam was being secretly bombed back into the stone age.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

27. It's more than that: Taiwan and South Korea both lucked out with

their governments.

While the governments that ruled those countries from the 1960s to the late 1980s or early 1990s were dictatorial, they were Confucian dictators who believed that the ruler had to benefit the people. That's why they invested heavily in education, infrastructure, and health, all things that are taboo for 3rd World countries under the IMF/World Bank strictures (Gotta grow those cash crops for export, you know, and stop government waste by removing food subsidies, because you need money to buy weapons...). They allowed foreign firms in, but they kept strict controls over them, requiring technology transfers and training of local people for management and scientific jobs, so that when the companies left for cheaper labor markets, the Korean and Taiwanese companies could manufacture stuff on their own.

No country has ever grown rich merely by producing cash crops for the West and suppressing its labor force to make itself attractive to sweatshop owners. Yet this is the formula that has been forced on Latin America and other impoverished regions.

[rman]

14. "the global south is full of such people" -

primarily due to US/Western support for governments that put US/Western economic interests above the interests of their own nation.
History shows that people are lifted out of poverty when a 3rd world government does put national interests over US/Western interests. See Cuba and more recently Venezuela, where no-one is poor wrt primary needs such as food, housing, education en healthcare. By that measure the poor in the US are poorer than the poor in Cuba and Venezuela.

It's interesting that you do identify "Western meddling" and "supporting friendly regimes regardless of their politics" as a cause of poverty in poor nations, and then put the blame for the military dictatorships, corruption and the responsibility for "reform" squarely on those poor nations. What about responsibility of western nations for their meddling and support for military dictatorship in those poor nations?

[SanCristobal]

19. Outside of Latin America and oil states,

the US really doesn't care about most nations. US meddling is a big part of some countries situations, but it doesn't come close to serving as the ultimate explanation for southern poverty. It's far to easy to overstate the effect of neo-colonialism (thanks for reminding me of the term) to try and explain the world we live in. Doing so might do a nice job painting the US as some masterful puppeteer controlling the world, but it drastically over simplifies the situation.

There is no one reason that many southern governments are failures. Trying to paint them all as victims of western imperialism is not only ignorant of history but highly condescending. People make their own choices and control their own lives. American bogeymen don't rule the world, I could count on one hand the number of times US interference can be considered the primary reason for a government remaining in power*.

The common bond shared by these impoverished states isn't western interference. It is governments failing to preserve the rule of law. When a state fails to create a stable legal system which protects civil liberties and property right, it dooms its people to poverty. The opposite holds true as well; states which protect and enshrine these things can expect to see their quality of life increase. It is little wonder that the strongest common bond between the successful post-colonial nations is good government.

Cuba is the last state I would bring up in a discussion of good living. While some quality of life measurements may be above par for the developing world, Cuba's repressive government can't be considered anything but a disaster for the Cuban people. If it keeps to its current course Venezuela may end up the same way.




*ok, so maybe I need two hands. And some toes. Do you have any fingers I can borrow?

[rman]

22. Latin America and oil states covers quite a few nations

Africa is similarly exploited by Europe, and the rest of the World is mostly China and USSR.

Regarding Latin America and oil states there are virtually no exceptions to US meddling. As such it perfectly explains most of the poverty in those areas. The choices people make are always limited by government regulations, regulations made by a corrupt government payed for by western corporate interests.

Really, your * says it all: you can count on one hand the exceptions to US interference being the cause of much poverty, misery and death.

I think it is disingenuous to try and disassociate US interference on the one hand and preservation of the rule of law on the other hand; US-sponsored terrorism is one of the primary methods of US interference.

It's not the US alone of course, it's generally speaking the wealthy nations, with the US - being the most powerful nation in the world as we all know very well - as front runner.

The "Cuba's repressive government" - line is just the usual vilification of a nation that don't put US interests first. In the US mass media you don't often hear about repressive government in US-supported dictatorships - as is to be expected. Pinochet, Batista, The Shah of Iran, CIA false-flag terrorism blamed on Mossadeq (as revealed in recently released government documents), et-f'in-cetera. As i said: there are virtually no exceptions.

[Jcrowley]

20. You speak

as if Western Meddling (meddling being a very soft term for wholesale slaughter and colossal banditry) is a thing of the past. You also seem to think 50 years is enough to right the wrongs of many hundreds of years when in fact entire cultures and entire knowledge patterns were purposefully wiped off the face of the Earth.

The 800 pound gorilla is till on the back of these people and countries it's just that some people don't see it as it is in the guise of the World Bank and the IMF though the US Military still makes itself welcome in other people's lands as in 725 bases in 132 countries (What do you think they are doing there?).

[rman]

13. "bad governance" - as in 'bad US foreign policy';

with its support for RW dictators over democratically elected nationalist leaders - for the simple reason that the former have "US interests" (primarily corporate interests) at heart while the latter put the interests of their own nation above that of the US - for which they are denounced as communist (or terrorists nowadays) - and the rest is well documented though not widely known history.

This why besides a "colonial legacy", there also still is colonialism - in so far that wealthy western nations dominate and control the economies of poor nations, for the benefit of large transnational corporate interests. You don't have to occupy territory in order to economically exploit a territory. This is often referred to as neo-colonialism.

[SanCristobal]

36. While the US interfered in a large number of countries,

there is a larger number that it never touched or tried to help. The governments replaced with US support were not particularly successful in the first place, like their successors they often failed to establish the basic governmental situation necessary for a stable and prosperous nation.

I'm not apologizing for US actions, only pointing out that they can only go so far in explaining developing world poverty. Most nations didn't have a US backed coup, and the ones which did were already impoverished states. The only tie that binds every case of developing world poverty together is bad government, and it is the most important factor in determining whether a nations prosperity will rise or fall.

This is true regardless of what foreign influences are present. Having a strong foreign governmental or corporate presence is usually a good sign, as it means that the state has established a legal framework sufficient to ensure confidence (even if it hasn't reached the point of truly promoting or achieving social justice for its people).

The time when nations can isolate themselves has ended, to be successful countries have to play ball in the international court. The only places avoiding this rule are those so chaotic, repressive or a combination of the two that they become pariah states. Such nations are not only the ultimate examples of bad government but universal icons of poverty.

[Selatius]

38. In response to your post

While the US interfered in a large number of countries, there is a larger number that it never touched or tried to help.

That was because nearly all other countries were colonial subjects of European powers. The US didn't touch these areas of the world for the fact that the area was already occupied by another world power at the time, namely European powers until the UN established a program of decolonization.

If you want a good example of a nation with a weak government from the very establishment, then throw together several different groups of people who have nothing in common with each other, some with histories of violence with each other, and make them all try to exist in peace and harmony with one another under a single government that is supposed to serve them all. The result is countries like Iraq, whose illogical borders were drawn up with no respect to cultural, religious, or ethnic realities on the ground. To add insult to injury, the British Empire cut off a portion of the land and dubbed it Kuwait to take away the region's millenia old access to the Gulf in order to keep the newly created Iraq weak. Now, take that situation and repeat it over and over again across the African continent. You've got nations cobbled together with different peoples who have nothing in common together. Some of them have years of bloodshed between them, and you expect this nation to have good government in such an environment? That's demanding too much.

The governments replaced with US support were not particularly successful in the first place, like their successors they often failed to establish the basic governmental situation necessary for a stable and prosperous nation.

That might be due to the fact that in many cases, the installation of the pro-US government was meant to benefit American business interests, not establish a stable government for the people to serve what the people want. The installation of the Shah was a perfect example, although with Iran's case the government before the coup was democratic in nature. They simply were guilty of electing a center-leftist (Mossadeq) who felt the nation's oil infrastructure should be used to fund social programs to lift people up, against the wishes of companies like BP, who lobbied both the UK and the US to have him killed.

I'm not apologizing for US actions, only pointing out that they can only go so far in explaining developing world poverty. Most nations didn't have a US backed coup, and the ones which did were already impoverished states. The only tie that binds every case of developing world poverty together is bad government, and it is the most important factor in determining whether a nations prosperity will rise or fall.

I would agree with the issue of bad governance as a determining factor in poverty, but on the same token, I also reject the notion that bad governance exists in a vacuum outside all other factors as well, such as foreign interference, corporate shenanigans, or illogically drawn national borders that foster conflict with different groups of people. While I am sure there are examples of governments that are simply corrupt, that doesn't mean there are also no governments that are corrupt that didn't end up that way because they are the product of foreign meddling or intervention or poorly drawn borders.

This is true regardless of what foreign influences are present. Having a strong foreign governmental or corporate presence is usually a good sign, as it means that the state has established a legal framework sufficient to ensure confidence (even if it hasn't reached the point of truly promoting or achieving social justice for its people).

Yes and no. A good economic policy includes both programs of redistribution (e.g. a progressive income tax) to fund social programs to fight hunger, disease, homelessness, etc. as well as pro-growth programs to encourage investment, innovation, etc. However, the purpose of any established government is to serve the interests of its citizens first and foremost. If the people, for instance, wish to nationalize the oil infrastructure to divert the revenue generated into education, health care, etc., then the hope is corporate interests and foreign governments do not come in and overthrow the government and install a dictatorship that serves those corporate interests.

[SanCristobal]

43. Thanks for the response.

Discussions like these are why I like this site. It is the most intellectually stimulating board I post on.

I didn't mean to overly downplay the effect of colonialism or other western interference in developing world poverty. Looking back at my posts I may have done so, although I did agknowledge the effects early on.

I agree that bad governance does not exist in a vacuum. I can't agree that it springs from one universal source. There are many different contributing factors to governments embracing the failed methodologies and policies that ensure southern poverty, trying to categorize them all would take far more time then anyone is likely to put into this discussion.

I'm less concerned with identifying the historical causes of bad governance then getting people to agknowledge it as the most important problem facing many developing nations. Governments that don't create the basic legal system necessary to protect their citizens rights and preserve stability need to be held accountable and made to change.

I dislike the "blame colonialism" attitude that many seem to hold because it is often used by the governments I'm referring to as a scapegoat for their own failures. Angry rants about decades old colonial ties (I'm talking about tin pot dictators ranting, not the people here, all of whom discussed it logically and reasonably) don't do anything to help solve problems, they only help those in power delay dealing with them.

[rman]

39. Governments replaced with US support never got a chance

Even the US did not manage to lift its poor out of poverty during the past 40 years or so (it only got worse). And though that's probably by design, it takes at least a couple of years for anti poverty policies to have an effect. By then there'd already been a US supported coup or assassination.

[a la izquierda]

29. To chime in...

colonial mindsets still plague much of Latin America. Indigenous peoples are oppressed mostly because of the racist mindsets of elites, most of whom deny their indigenous blood, if they have any at all. Such is the case in Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia and other parts of Latin America that have a hefty indigenous population. Brutal military dictatorships, composed mainly of creole elites, helped by the United States in many instances, physically kept indigenous peoples down, wrought havoc on what little lands they held and cut the generational bonds that allowed indigenous groups to flourish prior to colonization.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

46. The xenophilia of the Brazilian rich, for instance, is disgusting.

In the über-rich district of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro, there's a big shopping mall called "New York City Center". I post this pic with reluctance because it embarasses me to no end:

http://flickr.com/photos/claudiolara/92849608/in/pool-21103307@N00/

[northzax]

16. yes, by all means

let us return to sustenance living. Cause you know what sucks? Penicillin. Electricity. living past the age of 35.

let us not romanticize true sustenance living. Life in a true sustenance system is, as Thomas Hobbes would put it, nasty, brutish and short. The entirety of human civilization has been a push against true sustenance living. You want to try it though? strip naked and walk into the woods. see how long you live. In north america in the winter? I give you a week, if you are in the South. In the north? hours. Turn off the computer (unless, of course, you made it, and are pedalling furiously on a generation system of your own design and manufacture to power it) and go out there.

and yes, India's textiles were destroyed. but then, so was it's brutish class system and the practice of slavery. And you know what? India seems to be doing fairly well, don't you think? Do you suppose the life expectancy of an average man on the subcontinent 50 or 350 years ago was really 64 years? sheesh.

[Jcrowley]

18. You are simply presenting a caricature

In fact your entire post is as misguided and off as is Hobbes. There is vast anthropological research out there to prove your simplistic notions bear no semblance to reality. You may also wish to read Bartolome' de las Casas' journal entries for a first hand view of the culture of The Taino's but you've looked into that already I suppose? You may also recognize that in our "advanced" society that a black man in Harlem as a life expectancy less than that of a black man in Haiti (though that may not be accurate at this date since the latest US overthrow of Aristide it was in the late 90's). But you've looked into that I hope.

What my be interesting is to hold your words to the mirror and then compare them with the words of the brutal colonizers and the wicked folks that parade around as globalizers.

Life in a true sustenance system varied from place to place.

None of this matters much as the illusion of our present system is based on copious amounts of cheap energy and that use is destroying the planet at breakneck speed. Those days are over as the energy supplies dwindle. Those who have Real Skills not IT abstractions will fare better than others.

Learning from Ladakh:

Mainstream Western thinkers from Adam Smith to Freud and today's academics tend to universalize what is in fact Western or industrial experience. Explicitly or implicitly, they assume that the traits they describe are a manifestation of human nature, rather than a product of industrial culture. This tendency to generalize from Western experience becomes almost inevitable as Western culture reaches out from Europe and North America to influence all the earth's people.

Every society tends to place itself at the center of the universe and to view other cultures through its own colored lenses. What distinguishes Western culture is that it has grown so widespread and so powerful that it has lost a perspective on itself; there is no "other" with which to compare itself. It is assumed that everyone either is like us or wants to be.

Most Westerners have come to believe that ignorance, disease, and constant drudgery were the lot of preindustrial societies, and the poverty, disease, and starvation we see in the developing world might at first sight seem to substantiate this assumption. The fact is, however, that many, if not most of the problems in the "Third World" today are to a great extent the consequences of colonialism and misguided development.

Over the last decades, diverse cultures from Alaska to Australia have been overrun by the industrial monoculture. Today's conquistadors are "development," advertising, the media, and tourism. Across the world, "Dallas" beams into people's homes and pinstripe suits are de rigueur. This year I have seen almost identical toy shops appear in Ladakh and in a remote mountain village of Spain. They both sell the same blonde, blue-eyed Barbie dolls and Rambos with machine guns.

The spread of the industrial monoculture is a tragedy of many dimensions. With the destruction of each culture, we are erasing centuries of accumulated knowledge, and as diverse ethnic groups feel their identity threatened, conflict and social breakdown almost inevitably follow.

Increasingly, Western culture is coming to be seen as the normal way, the only way. And as more and more people around the world become competitive, greedy, and egotistical, these traits tend to be attributed to human nature. Despite persistent voices to the contrary, the dominant thinking in Western society has long assumed that we are indeed aggressive by nature, locked in a perpetual Darwinian struggle. The implications of this view for the way we structure our society are of fundamental importance. Our assumptions about human nature, whether we believe in inherent good or evil, underlie our political ideologies and thus help to shape the institutions that govern our lives.

http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v10.4/norberg-hodge.html

[northzax]

25. not to point out an error

but the life expectancy for an urban black man in the united states is 64. The life expectancy for a man born in Haiti is 54. (in fact, the life expectancy for a black man in the rural US is even lower, total of 58, but still higher than Haiti.) don't let the facts get in the way of some good ideology though. As a general rule, urban life expectancy is higher than rural life expectancy. people in cities live longer. Counterintuitive, I know, but the way it is. As of today, for the first time in history, more people live in urban areas than in non-urban ones.

The fact is, people seem to like the western model, and choose to adapt it. When given a choice between sustenance agriculture and industrialization, individuals overwhelmingly choose indsutrialization (not all, of course) who are you to tell people that their culture and traditions are so precious that they can't have an education, learn to read, have an ambition besides simply surviving on agriculture? Who are you to tell people that they must disband their cities (since cities are obviously not sustenance-agriculture based) and return to the traditions they have, in many (but not all) cases abandonded? Personally, I have worked on an organic farm, it is miserable, backbreaking work, and I have the deepest respect for those who choose to do it, but it's not for me. Personally, I like having a computer (and I see you do as well) I like having electricity, and lighting, and coffee and tea, and food that does no grow within a cart's ride of my home. I like antibiotics, without them, I would be dead several times over. modern surgical techniques, I'm a big fan. it's great that my 76 year old boss could fall and break her hip and not die. I'm a fan. I have many of the skills I need to live in a quasi-industrial society, I can kill my own game, clean it and store it. I can grow food. I can build a shelter with rudimentary tools I made myself. I can work 14 hours a day, seven days a week in a field. I am lucky that I don't have to, because frankly, I don't want to. can you?

Seriously, while you are all wrapped up in ideology, go live the life and report back in a year. go live a truely preindustrial life and let us know how that works out for you.

this is not to say that, in many cases, the shock of industrialization has not been bad for individuals. it certainly has often been. but the long term benefits of allowing people the choice outweigh the costs. I certainly have no desire to pick and choose which 5 billion people will die to return to a sustenance agrarian society, or are you volunteering?

you reference an article saying that there is a toy store in Ladakh selling barbies. Fine, there is a toy store across the street from my office in DC selling arts and crafts made in Ladakh. Works both ways, see?

and your final point And as more and more people around the world become competitive, greedy, and egotistical, these traits tend to be attributed to human nature. I would posit that, since people seem to be willing to adopt these traits, indeed, eager to do so, that they are, in fact, human nature when society and circumstance doesn't pressure us to adopt other strategies. What were the pharoahs of ancient egypt, if not greedy, competitive and egotistical? what where the brahmins of India, if not greedy, competitive and egotisitical (or is the Taj Mahal a monument to sharing the wealth?) what were the Aztec and Mayan ziggaurats, if not monuments to greed, ego and competition? Been to Machu Picchu lately? Stonehenge? checked out the Imperial Palace in Beijing? want me to keep listing them?

Or take, perhaps, another sociological example. Take the big five religious traditions (Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity) Why do all teach sharing, compassion and humbleness, if, in fact, these are all normal human traits? If this is the way we naturally are, then why do we need prophets and gods to keep us in line? What was Buddha protesting, if not the lack of compassion for the poor and the basic unfairness of life in pre-industrial India? Why did the Haida, to name an indigenous people in a land of plenty, have cultural and religious traditions mandating that people share the wealth between the haves and have nots, if it is natural to do so? Why did many sub-saharan african tribes keep slaves from wars? Why did they have royalty? Hereditary royalty is a remarkably consistent feature of pre-industrial societies. including, of course, the unspoiled Ladakh. I am certain, though, that the Ladakh royalty worked in the fields with everyone else, right? contributing their fair share? please.

Localised sustenance did, in fact, vary from place to place, in places of plenty, it was all good. in places of scarcity, it sucked. just luck of the draw, I guess.

[Jcrowley]

26. I specified Harlem

This is patently false:


The fact is, people seem to like the western model, and choose to adapt it.

You would have to discount an entire history of colonialism and imperial conquest to to believe this to be true.

Works both ways? Not hardly. Kind of funny when you recognize that both are for sale and then ponder the core point of the article.

[northzax]

28. nope

It is not patently false. It is, in fact, a constant pattern of behaviour. you can say that this behavioural preference is influenced by other things, but it is still a behavioural preference trend that exists today. You can say that "You would have to discount an entire history of colonialism and imperial conquest to to believe this to be true." but that doesn't change the fact that, at this point in time, it is true. the past cannot be undone, without a time machine of some sort at least, so we are faced with the problem that the genie is out of the bottle.

you will notice that I deliberatly used the present tense of the verb 'to choose' not the past tense. While important to understand, behaviour in the past cannot be changed, and we must deal with the present and future. in the past people were forced to choose at gun or sword point- today they overwhelmingly choose, when faced with the option, to not live the way their ancestors did.

in fact, please demonstrate to me a country where, in the past 40 years, the people have risen and said "we don't want western culture, we don't want medicine, or weapons, or electricty, or education! we refuse to use colonial languages, or worship colonial gods, we will turn inwards, and live as our ancestors did, in a tribal village." go on, list 'em. I'll start you off: Khmer Rouge. your turn.

any comments on the rest of my post? guess not. the core point of your article seems to be that everyone was better off in 2000 BC when there was no colonialism of any sort. I disagree. it fails to acknowledge that all this has, in fact, happened, and we are faced with the decision of what to do now, not what should have been done millenia ago. if your aunt had a penis, she'd be your uncle, but she ain't.

So, list the societies that, once exposed to western culture and technology, have chosen to completely reject it. Completely. make a deal with you., for every one you list, I will donate $25 to the non-profit of your choice. for every one you list that I can easily refute, you donate $25 to the charity of my choice (oh, wait, charities are a western, industrialized concept, but surely you will over look that for this wager, right?) remember, they must have been exposed to western culture and chosen to refuse it.

[Jcrowley]

31. They haven't "chosen" it

That's not the way it works and an impressively simplistic and ahistorical idea of power relations and imperialistic processes.

[northzax]

40. ok, this is getting ridiculous

I must say. I write paragraphs, and you stick your fingers in your ears and refuse to listen to anything that is in the slightest bit opposed to what you want to hear. In response to reasoned critiques, you post one liners. I tell you, it's a damn good thing our president doesn't do that, otherwise we'd end up in some sort of unwinnable war with no good strategy to get out.

oh, wait a minute.

and, as a parting shot, I know it is hard to understand, but indingenous people can, in fact, make choices for themselves, they don't actually need you sitting behind your keyboard telling them what they should, and should not, value.

[Jcrowley]

42. Quite ridiculous

indeed as are the entire premises for your lengthy but unsubstantive posts.

Perhaps we could use your silly 25 cent "challenge" and put into the equation the number of people who have entirely been wiped off the map and the number of languages that have been disappeared, the number of cultures annihilated and so on. Your calculations are simply mistaken from the start. And singing the song of the neo-liberal economic model only serves to display the weakness of your position.

The anthropolgical and historical evidence is out there in abundance. I suggest you examine it.

"And yet I know," Khan would say, "that my empire is made of the stuff of crystals, its molecules arranged in a perfect pattern. Amid the surge of elements, a splendid hard diamond takes shape, an immense, faceted, transparent mountain. Why do your travel impressions stop at disappointing appearances, never catching this implacable process? Why do you linger over inessential melancholies? Why do you hide from the emperor the grandeur of his destiny?"

And Marco answered: "While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered. When you know at last the residue of unhappiness for which no precious stone can compensate, you will be able to calculate the exact number of carats toward which the final diamond must strive. Otherwise, your calculations will be mistaken from the very start."

[northzax]

44. do we have a responsibility to protect language and culture?

If the speakers of that language and that culture choose not to protect it themselves? do you go to sleep at night mourning the loss of cunneiform B? that no one speaks aramaic (besides Mel Gibson, of course) that Latin is not taught in schools? that indigenous Japanese was wiped from the earth two millenia ago in favor of a more sinophilic version? do you hear the wails of Troy, Carthage, Machu Picchu, Sparta, Ur, Chaco Canyon and the untold other cities and cultures destroyed by time and other, non-western european cultures?

Congratulations on reading your Calvino. You did, however, completely miss the point. What Marco Polo wanted us to realize is that every decision, every difference, comes at the cost of other decisions and differences that will never be. But to dwell on it too much is to invite paralysis. you cannot change what cities have been destroyed, what cultures never were, what languages are lost to time. you can only address the situation today.

I'll see your Calvino and raise you Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

and, of course, since you are obsessed with the past and loss: Heraclites: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

let's play some Choose your own adventure!

So imagine now, you are cruising along the great grey green limpopo river (all ringed about with fever trees, of course) and you come across an indigenous tribe, let's call them the Joneses. The Joneses have had little contact with the western world (much like that tribe that walked out of the Amazon a few years ago,) They take you to their leader, let's call him Bob. Bob's 10 year old daughter is engaged to be married to an older man, as his fifth wife. You, however, as a doctor, know that she is likely to develop a fistule because her hips are too narrow. Simply taking her to the nearest hospital will save her life. The tribe does not use currency, as we know it, so they cannot pay. What do you do? let her be married off and die in childbirth, or remove her from the situation and take her to the nearest hospital, thereby exposing the entire tribe to western culture and inevitably destroying theirs? Who do you pick, what you see as the benefit of the tribe, or what is to the immdiate benefit of the girl? There is no 'right' answer, it comes down to whether you value culture or human life more. Would you slash the Mona Lisa to save a life, or slash a man to save the Mona Lisa? What will you tell the Joneses? "I can help you, but that would ruin your traditional culture and way of life, so sorry."? come on.

[Jcrowley]

45. Sounds like the same paternal

language as is writ in Manifest Destiny.

And again your statement that "THEY CHOOSE" not to protect their culture/language reveals a deeply misguided understanding of historical processes.

Pretty admirable that you can be so blind as to take several hundreds years of colonial conquest and boil it down to "choice."

The same insanity is taught throughout the halls of Ivy League pro-globalizing (new-age colonialism) economic schools of Industrial Holocaust. The same lexicon is being used. I'm very familiar with this and it is not only devoid of all on the ground conditions and the complexities of daily lives but also very tedious and predictable.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve. They are by nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from embroilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people are the most devoid of rancors, hatreds, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world. And because they are so weak and complaisant, they are less able to endure heavy labor and soon die of no matter what malady. The sons of nobles among us, brought up in the enjoyments of life's refinements, are no more delicate than are these Indians, even those among them who are of the lowest rank of laborers. They are also poor people, for they not only possess little but have no desire to possess worldly goods. For this reason they are not arrogant, embittered, or greedy. Their repasts are such that the food of the holy fathers in the desert can scarcely be more parsimonious, scanty, and poor. As to their dress, they are generally naked, with only their pudenda covered somewhat. And when they cover their shoulders it is with a square cloth no more than two varas in size. They have no beds, but sleep on a kind of matting or else in a kind of suspended net called bamacas. They are very clean in their persons, with alert, intelligent minds, docile and open to doctrine, very apt to receive our holy Catholic faith, to be endowed with virtuous customs, and to behave in a godly fashion. And once they begin to hear the tidings of the Faith, they are so insistent on knowing more and on taking the sacraments of the Church and on observing the divine cult that, truly, the missionaries who are here need to be endowed by God with great patience in order to cope with such eagerness. Some of the secular Spaniards who have been here for many years say that the goodness of the Indians is undeniable and that if this gifted people could be brought to know the one true God they would be the most fortunate people in the world.

Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during tla! past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.

The island of Cuba is nearly as long as the distance between Valladolid and Rome; it is now almost completely depopulated. San Juan and Jamaica are two of the largest, most productive and attractive islands; both are now deserted and devastated. On the northern side of Cuba and Hispaniola he the neighboring Lucayos comprising more than sixty islands including those called Gigantes, beside numerous other islands, some small some large. The least felicitous of them were more fertile and beautiful than the gardens of the King of Seville. They have the healthiest lands in the world, where lived more than five hundred thousand souls; they are now deserted, inhabited by not a single living creature. All the people were slain or died after being taken into captivity and brought to the Island of Hispaniola to be sold as slaves. When the Spaniards saw that some of these had escaped, they sent a ship to find them, and it voyaged for three years among the islands searching for those who had escaped being slaughtered , for a good Christian had helped them escape, taking pity on them and had won them over to Christ; of these there were eleven persons and these I saw.

<snip>

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies. And also, those lands are so rich and felicitous, the native peoples so meek and patient, so easy to subject, that our Spaniards have no more consideration for them than beasts. And I say this from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed. But I should not say "than beasts" for, thanks be to God, they have treated beasts with some respect; I should say instead like excrement on the public squares. And thus they have deprived the Indians of their lives and souls, for the millions I mentioned have died without the Faith and without the benefit of the sacraments. This is a wellknown and proven fact which even the tyrant Governors, themselves killers, know and admit. And never have the Indians in all the Indies committed any act against the Spanish Christians, until those Christians have first and many times committed countless cruel aggressions against them or against neighboring nations. For in the beginning the Indians regarded the Spaniards as angels from Heaven. Only after the Spaniards had used violence against them, killing, robbing, torturing, did the Indians ever rise up against them....

<snip>

After the wars and the killings had ended, when usually there survived only some boys, some women, and children, these survivors were distributed among the Christians to be slaves. The repartimiento or distribution was made according to the rank and importance of the Christian to whom the Indians were allocated, one of them being given thirty, another forty, still another, one or two hundred, and besides the rank of the Christian there was also to be considered in what favor he stood with the tyrant they called Governor. The pretext was that these allocated Indians were to be instructed in the articles of the Christian Faith. As if those Christians who were as a rule foolish and cruel and greedy and vicious could be caretakers of souls! And the care they took was to send the men to the mines to dig for gold, which is intolerable labor, and to send the women into the fields of the big ranches to hoe and till the land, work suitable for strong men. Nor to either the men or the women did they give any food except herbs and legumes, things of little substance. The milk in the breasts of the women with infants dried up and thus in a short while the infants perished. And since men and women were separated, there could be no marital relations. And the men died in the mines and the women died on the ranches from the same causes, exhaustion and hunger. And thus was depopulated that island which had been densely populated.


http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/02-las.html

Choices? Right. Historical amnesia is not a pretty thing to witness.

I go to bed not singing the song or using the language of the oppressor. Many more examples of the above are out there. Take the time...

[northzax]

48. so to answer the question of what to do today

you cite Las Casas. Lemme guess, Sophomore? Don't worry, next semester you will learn that Las Casas is just as paternalistic and white-man's burdenish as the Dominicans who committed the genocide against Hispaniola.

My suggestion to you is to stop reading only about the past, and start thinking about the future. Sure, know what happened, but face the reality of the present and future. or don't, and spend your entire life complaining about how unfair it all is instead of working to solve a problem.

And you still haven't answered the question of what to do now?

[rebel with a cause]

54. To not learn from the past is to repeat it.

Not getting into the argument, just thought I would add that bit of wisdom here.

[Jcrowley]

57. Here ya' go

I'll ignore your insults which are way off base. I'll also ignore your assumptions which are also completely based on your lack of knowledge. If you wish to compare notes on what we are actually doing fine but I tend to keep my personal life off the net. You assume to know what it is I am doing or not doing yet I don't recall we've met. If you wish you can come for a visit and see first hand. We will be planting in the spring and reclaiming the space in late winter so it is much work but you are welcome. No questions asked.

What to do is easy and obvious and the fact that people have to ask is a sign of how out of touch we have become with the necessary reality. Hopefully you are living very low to the ground and recognizing the level of change we all need to make individually and collectively. If you'll pay attention you'll find I have posted on "what to do" more than a few times but those threads sink like a rock. Others have done the same and rarely do those threads get more than a few handful of responses. It's also important to undertand that if what you are doing is within the construct of the disease you are not only wasting your time but perpetuating the disease. well here are a few starts, I'll post more if you wish.

Also leave the insults for another situation. If you wish to pore over vast amounts of anthropolgical data as some sort of ridiculous challenge you may wish to start a thread on that PM me and will discuus this. In the meantime:

Creating Alternate Economies

Are there alternatives to the fiction that is the Market? Here is a sampling of a variety of economic strategies:

* Household economies

* Gift economies
* Barter economies
* Gathering economies
* Cooperative economies
* Community Market economies


As McKenzie Wark reminds us in the epigraph to this article, there is no one strategy, no one right way. Perhaps the one thing that is required is the leap of faith that will permit us to adopt a variety of strategies, which in itself requires new ways of thinking and new ways of being. Adopting such strategies will alter our everyday lives, which, because change is scary, will be daunting. But isn't a new kind of everyday life the goal? The formation of Community is simultaneously the manifestation and the means by which people can control their own lives; and this occurs in proportion to which thriving, viable local economies are made possible — not in the sense of The Market, but in the communal production and exchange of goods.

This means seeking ways to create our own ventures with each other's assistance, whether locally or over great distances. We learn to seek each other's help through our ever-growing chains of trust, making use of our unique abilities and expertise. We must learn to train ourselves to seek each other out as our first option, rather than look elsewhere for what we need; we learn to seek what we need through our own community first. There's a reason all those xtian dove logos showed up in ads and yellow pages a generation ago — it was a sign that identified themselves to their community, and community members learned to seek out their own for what they needed.

We don't seek official accreditation, official credentialization (unless doing so provides needed cover). We accredit and credentialize each other. We start our own art galleries for our own artists, our own publishing ventures for our own authors; we develop our own business plans, production strategies, distribution networks; develop our own accounting strategies; become our own postal carriers.

http://inspectorlohmann.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-invisible-comic-community.html
_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Translating the natural law of the planet into human activities means organizing society much as ecosystems organize themselves:
• Following a mindful policy, like nature does, of conservation, preservation and sustainable use of water, air, soil, forestry, land and wildlife systems.
• Using local organically produced foods from the region's food chain.
• Depending on renewable energy sources particular to the region.
• Practicing an ethic of earth stewardship through land trusting or land-valued single taxes, for example.
• Creating self-reliant regional economies which circulate capital and resources within a region while dispersing surplus resources to help other parts of the system become self-reliant, not dependent.
• Setting up local/regional systems of production and distribution that are scaled to human capacity and use appropriate ecological conscious technologies.
• Supporting economic democracy which creates local worker and community-owned and managed enterprises.
• Restoring power to local community/regional governments as the most efficient means for meeting the basic needs for food, shelter, energy, health, and education of its people.
• Redesigning local communities to reintegrate community functions, thereby eliminating much automobile use, and emphasizing efficient mass transit systems for the transportation needs that remain.
• Using the media to inform and enlighten members of the community rather than hypnotizing and numbing them.
• Supporting preventive whole system health care and education which integrates mind, body and spirit in an ecological awareness of life.
• Developing a consciousness of peace which seeks to settle differences on all levels internal, interpersonal, intrafamilial, international through negotiation and not violence.
• Recognizing and accepting the identities of cultures different from our own and empowering them, rather than infantilizing them, in their own process of growth.
• Recognizing the right and dignity of all species to share in the gifts of creations.
• Returning each person to the sense of self as an artist and sculptor of life.

From the tradition of the Haudenosaunee - the Six Nation Confederacy of the Iroquois

[Jcrowley]

58. Here's a thread you may enjoy

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3051051

[GumboYaYa]

50. The aboriginal peoples of Australia continued to use their

stone tools in a hunting-gathering socity long after being exposed to metals and agricultural techniques. Many continue to live that way today.

Threre is one. Are you going to donate $25.00 for each instance I name, b/c I can probably think of a lot more? The thing I am struggling to do is think of any societies that actually got the choice to adopt western conventions rather than having them forced on them by conquest.

[sandnsea]

52. There aren't enough resources

We are already feeling pressure from the economic emergence of India & China. There just isn't enough for the entire world to live the kind of consumer-based lifestyle that we do in this country. That is not to say we have to go back to huts. But we can make changes in our lifestyle that will allow the entire planet to sustain a comfortable level that ensures future generations have... penicillin, electricity, health care, longevity...

[jaksavage]

23. I am Awed

So well put, thanks.
I would offer that living at a subsistance level is indeed brutal, but living sustainably would be much less so, although the change would still be dramatic.

[bobbolink]

53. Welcome to DU, jaksavage!

:toast:

[Joe Chi Minh]

24. It's a theme very dear to my heart. Tolstoy and Slozhenitzyn forgot

forgotten more than our dolts, the Milton Friedman's and their minions ever learnt.

I have a priest friend in Australia who is a man of truly heroic virtue, living a life of constant self-sacrifice. He was a chaplain in a hard-time prison for 14 years, with some hours spent serving in an Old Folks home, and has now been moved to the chaplaincy in a home for the mentally disadvantaged.

Anyway, he lamented to me that young aboriginal lads often spent money from their wages on designer-label trainers and such like. And I pointed out that they were trying to integrate, be European, while mostly they were reviled because the tens of thousands of years they had lived as hunter-gatherers in surely one of THE most hostile environments, had made them an extraordinarily spiritual people, kind of archangels (not always of goodness, but very often), which meant that integration into materialistic Western society was a very up-hill job for them.

I don't recall whether I said it at the time, but to me, they - not the "educated" either in the world or in the Church - represent Mary, who "chose the better part"; while the latter, the "educated" were represented by Martha - always busy. You may remember Jesus said that it was Mary who had chosen the better part, although this marian type historically seems to have been interpreted, however implicitly, as referring to the worldly wise. The contemplative orders of monks, held to be the highest and most spiritual by the Church, seem to have been populated almost entirely by professionals and aristocrats - who, until more recent times, would be served by brothers - manual workers, not academically-oriented.

Anyway, the great thing about hunter-gatherer societies is that, however unwittingly, the earliest Christian Church seems to have taken them for their template. Nobody owned things; the tribe, the people had the use of things, under God.

I've just found this in the Wikipedia window for "hunter gatherers" on Google, in which the term, "primitive communism" appears.

"At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition. At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society," in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.

One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food (Kelly<1>, 31). Some Marxists have theorised that hunter-gatherers would have used primitive communism and anarcho-primitivists elaborate the mechanics further by asserting it would have been a gift economy, although this would not have applied for all hunter-gatherer societies."

I'm not suggesting that all the perquisites of our affluent materialistic civilisation should be viewed as redundant and dispensed with, but at the level of the organisation of our societies, AS SOCIETIES, not as part society, part enslaved hosts to the engorged societal parasite. It is clearly the direction in which we will be going in a general sense, because this time, the far right have gone too far - the worst doubtless yet to come - and the truth of all its evil will be taught at the knee, in infant school, primary
school, high school and university.

[Jcrowley]

32. You will appreciate this- Karl Marx and The Iroquois

Karl Marx's Ethnological Notebooks -notes for a major study he never lived to write, {are} extensively annotated excerpts from works of Lewis Henry Morgan and others are a jigsaw puzzle for which we have to reinvent the missing pieces out of our own research and revery and above all, our own revolutionary activity. Typically although the existence of the notebooks has been know since Marx's death in 1883, they were published integrally for the first time only eighty-nine years later...


Marx's passages from Morgan's chapters on the Iroquois are proportionally much longer than his of his excerpts from Ancient Society, and in fact make up one of the largest sections of the Notebooks. It was not only Iroquois social organization, however, that appealed to him, but rather a whole way of life sharply counter-posed, all along the line, to modern industrial civilization. His overall admiration for North American Indian societies generally, and for the Iroquois in particular, is made clear throughout the text, perhaps most strongly in his highlighting of Morgan's reference to their characteristic "sense of independence" and "personal dignity?' qualities both men appreciated but found greatly diminished as humankind's "property career" advanced. Whatever reservations Marx may have had regarding the universal applicability of the Iroquois "model" in the analysis of gentile societies, the painstaking care with which he copied out Morgan's often meticulous descriptions of the various aspects of their culture shows how powerfully these people impressed him. Whole pages of the Notebooks recount, in marvelous detail, Iroquois Council procedures and ceremonies:

at a signal the sachems arose and marched 3 times around the Burning Circle, going as before by the North… Master of the ceremonies again rising to his feet, filled and lighted the pipe of peace from his own fire; drew 3 whiffs, the first toward the Zenith (which meant thanks to the Great Spirit...); the second toward the ground (means thanks to his Mother, the Earth. for the various productions which had ministered to his sustenance); third toward the Sun (means thanks for his never-failing light, ever shining upon all). Then he passed the pipe to the first upon his right toward the North…

<snip>

The record of Marx's vision-quest through Morgan's Ancient Society offers us a unique and amazing close-up of the final phase of what Raya Dunayevskaya has called Marx's "never-ending search for new paths to revolution?' The young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 summed up revolution as "the supersession of private property.' His starting-point was the critique of alienated labor which "alienates nature from man, man from himself. . from the species"-that is, labor dominated by the system of private property, by capital, the "inhuman power" that "rules over everything:' spreading its "infinite degradation" over the fundamental relation of man to woman and reducing all human beings to commodities. Thus the "supersession of private property" meant for Marx not only the "emancipation of the workers" (which of course involves "the emancipation of humanity as a whole"), but also "the emancipation of all the human qualities and senses" (the senses themselves having become directly, as he expressed it with characteristic humor; "theoreticians in practice"). This "positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation" is also, at the same time, "the real appropriation of human nature' -'in other words, communism, the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.

<snip>

Ancient Society, and especially its detailed account of the Iroquois, for the first time gave Marx insights into the concrete possibilities of a free society as it had actually existed in history Morgan's conception of social and cultural evolution enabled him to pursue the problems he had taken up philosophically in 1844 in a new way, from a different angle, and with new revolutionary implications. Marx's references, in these notes and elsewhere, to terms and phrases recognizable as Morgan's, point toward his general acceptance of Morgan's outline of the evolution of human society. Several times in the non-Morgan sections of the Notebooks, for example, he reproaches other writers for their ignorance of the character of the gens, or of the "Upper Status of Barbarism." In drafts of a letter written shortly after reading Morgan he specified that "Primitive communities… form a series of social groups which, differing in both type and age, mark successive phases of evolution."' But this does not mean that Marx adopted, in all its details, the so-called "unilinear" evolutionary plan usually attributed to Morgan-a plan which, after its uncritical endorsement by Engels in The Origin of the Family, has remained ever since a fixture of "Marxist" orthodoxy. Evidence scattered throughout the Notebooks suggests, rather, that Marx had grown markedly skeptical of fixed categories in attempts at historical reconstruction, and that he continued to affirm the multilinear character of human social development that he had advanced as far back as the Grundrisse in the 1850s.

<snip>

However, if our reading of Marx's notes is right, he found things in Ancient Society infinitely more valuable to him than arguments for or against any mere classificatory system. The book's sheer immensity of new information-new for Marx and for the entire scientific world, demonstrated conclusively the true complexity of "primitive" societies as welt as their grandeur, their essential superiority, in real human terms, to the degraded civilization founded on the fetishism of commodities. In a note written just after his conspectus of Morgan we find Marx arguing that "primitive communities had incomparably greater vitality than the Semitic, Greek, Roman and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies?" Thus Marx had come to realize that, measured according to the "wealth of subjective human sensuality," as he had expressed it in the 1844 manuscripts, Iroquois society stood much higher than any of the societies "poisoned by the pestilential breath of civilization?' Even more important, Morgan's lively account of the Iroquois gave him a vivid awareness of the actuality of indigenous peoples, and perhaps even a glimpse of the then-undreamed of possibility that such peoples could make their own contributions to the global struggle for human emancipation.

http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/marx_iroquois.html

The link is at present non-functioning here is a bit more of the same:

[Joe Chi Minh]

33. Well, that is interesting. Thank you.

You are probably aware that the Quaker economist Ernst Shumacher, in his book, Small Is Beautiful, stated that work was a postitive need for a mans' fulfilment, and argued that giving money to third-world governmetns didn't hel the people, since they were at best invested in capital-intensive machinery, rather than labour intensive means.

I can't remember whether he mentioned it, but we know that today such funds are more likely to be spent on military materiel, in fact, to be tied to it!

I remember when I studied first year Anthropology in 1968, it was already established among anthropologists that there was no such thing s a primitive people. When any people historically designated as such were studied, it was discovered that their societies and skills were extremely sophisticated and apt to best exploit (in a very positive sense) their environment.

[Jcrowley]

34. Work as worship

Yes Schumacher's book was a remendous influence and I still have my tattered copy with certain parts earmarked for reference. Work is intrinsic to our nature but what we have been conditioned to think of as work is drudgery (wage-slavery) for the most part and so therefore folks understandably loathe it. It is one of the great confusions of our time. And the classical tenets of neo-liberal economics, which is in all meaningful ways similar to neo-conservative economics, are still perpetuated in most if not all American Universities and we can look around here and see many echoing the same sentiments.

The term "primitive" sure is loaded. And now the conditioning is so deeply ingrained to get folks to see in different ways is very daunting.

Anyway here is another article that speaks to your point from Vandana Shiva. She is quite brilliant. Winner of the Right Livelihood Award in 1996 which is the alternative Nobel Prize.

Work Is Worship
The Convergence Of Spirituality, Sustainability And Justice
by Vandana Shiva

January 21, 2005

<snip>

However, Basava, recognized that social equality could not be achieved without economic equality. And Kayaka and Dasoha were the two pillars for economic justice and economic democracy. Kayaka literally means physical work or work done by the body. It embodies the principles of dignity of man, dignity of labour, and divinity of labour.

These principles are violated both by the old caste system or religious orthodoxy and the new caste system of corporate globalisation. The financial institutions and global corporation are today’s Brahmins. Ordinary working people everywhere are “sudras” and “dalits”. Those who do not work, accumulate wealth. Those who work, get poorer. Sixteen thousand peasants in India took their lives during 2004 because a globalised economic system devalues their work, and creates market opportunities for agribusiness, which sells costly seeds and chemicals and buys cheap produce from farmers. Global trade is based on false prices which reflect neither the value of work, nor the value of resources. Economic polarization and ecological devastation is an inevitable consequence of an economic system based on false prices and devaluation of people’s work and nature’s contributions. According to Basaveswara, it is a great sin to sell or buy an article at an unjust price. The “cheap” food of globalised, industrialized agriculture is based on not paying the full value of farmers work and natural wealth. Globalisation, based on unjust prices is therefore a sinful system, and we have a spiritual duty to create just alternatives based on the creativity of every individual, and the intrinsic value of everyone’s creative expressions in physical work.

Work as worship becomes a revolutionary force in a period where the global economic system is based on the end to work. “Kayaka” in contemporary times can create new energies to end unemployment and inequality. However, as Prof. Basavaraja states in his book Basavesvara, “Kayaka” does not mean merely a vocation for eking one’s livelihood. Of course everyone must take up some vocation or the other for one’s existence. No one should live on somebody else’s labour, as a parasite. The vocation which an individual follows should not be harmful to the society. It should fulfill the needs of the society. The returns for doing work must not be reserved exclusively for oneself, but also meet the needs of the society, thus leading to the principle of each one working according to his capacity and taking the returns from it according to his needs. Through it, one’s selfishness must vanish, making a room for the global consciousness. Any work done in such absolute detachment shall become ‘Kayaka’ or worship.

One must work and live well. And also one must overcome selfishness and not claim the rewards exclusively for oneself. Without living exclusively for oneself one must learn to live for the good of others as well. One must distribute the fruit of ones labour in a spirit of Dasoha. Only then will the work become Kayaka or holy work and worship. Thus, any work undertaken for the good of the world shall be worship or Kayaka. It is only in this sense that the Saranas said the Kayaka or dedicated work was paradise.

Work as worship can also offer solutions to the ecological crisis. The crisis of pollution, the spread of toxic chemicals in agriculture, the excessive use of fossil fuels leading to climate change, are all rooted in replacing human labour with chemicals and machines. The fossil fuel economy which is leading to climate change is based on “energy slaves”.

The ideological and limited concept of ‘productivity’ of technologies has been universalized with the consequence that all other costs of the economic process become invisible. The invisible forces which contribute to the increased ‘productivity’ of a modern farmer or factory worker emanate from the increased consumption of non-renewable natural resources. Lovins has described this as the amount of ‘slave’ labour at present at work in the world. According to him, each person on earth, on an average, possesses the equivalent of about fifty slaves, each working forty hours a week. Man’s annual global energy conversion from alls sources (wood, fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, nuclear) at present approximately 8 x 10 watts. This is more than twenty times the energy content of the food necessary to feed the present world population at the FAO standard per capita requirement of 3,600 cals per day.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7078

[Joe Chi Minh]

55. "Work as worship", or as the old Roman Catholic latin saying puts it:

"laborare est orare", or "to work is to pray".

Also, the Church teaches the dignity of labour; all labour. As well the Apostles being mostly manual workers, St Joseph has been designated as the patron of the univeral church. Sadly, despite this extraordinary fund of accumulated wisdom at the disposal of the Catholic church, class distinctions, not to speak of class warfare, have, if anything been more apparent in traditional Catholic countries. Christianity, by the nature of the vocation it represents, has always been a hard row to hoe when aspired to in good faith, but how much more truly spiritual and humane the Church is today.

Few things have had such a revolutionary effect on my life and outlook as the concept of doing everything for the glory of God - and hence to the best of my ability. No matter how seemingly humble the task. What used to be drudgery, e.g working on a factory production line became a very fulfilling activity, almost a sport.

Once you get into a rhythm, it's as if alpha waves take over your mind. Do you remember the buzz everyone got when Cool Hand Luke showed them that the toil that was supposed to contribute to their punishment could be brilliant! Everyone bar the psycho guard with the mirror sunglasses!

Your mind is mostly free during manual work, anyway, which is a great benefit and privilege, since you are free at some level to reflect and ponder everything; whereas more cerebral tasks leave scant opportunity for free-ranging reflection.

Also with manual work, the physical sense of fulfilment at the end of the day is palpable - even through you may be physically tired. I've always found jobs such gardening difficult to enjoy though, as you can't by the nature of things get into a rhythm, and any physical effort seems kind of wasted. I mean to my Phillistine mind, of course! More nurturing types obviously get a kick out of the purpose of planting and cultivating. I often wonder with women, if it's a kind of gender memory of the Garden of Eden that rings their chimes.

The fear and greed which divides our world (in the words of a certain intercessory prayer in the RC Church's psalm book, the "Prayer of the Church" - what used to be called "The Hours", referred to, though not by that name, in the Epistles) seem to originate almost entirely in the hearts of our Western financiers and armaments manufacturers.

[pitohui]

59. yeah or as the germans put it, work makes free

come on hard physical labor stinks, it cripples, it kills, and the overwhelming majority of people are not young men in their first youth who can do such work without pain

we should have had robots doing all that crap long before now

[Joe Chi Minh]

60. One word: Rubbish!

[LeftofU]

30. K&R

[kohodog]

35. K. Important topic.

[Blue_Tires]

41. ttt n/t

[Crandor]

47. Now there's an idea.

If we can convince the third world that being poor is cool, then the multinational corps can't outsource to them - big win for workers in industrialized countries. Interesting plan. A tad cold and calculating for my taste, though.

[pitohui]

56. doesn't really make a lot of sense

It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and
markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.


i'm no historian but i'm pretty sure that north america was a colony too

simplistic answers that don't answer, i'm getting tired of them

and while i don't know what "sustenance living" is, i do know what "subsistence living" is, it's people dying of old age at 35

there's a reason people like the industrial era and until we provide real alternatives it's all sound and fury signifying not a heck of a lot

[oblivious]

61. Yes, it's an important issue, but this explanation is too simplistic.

There are different reasons for different countries.

Why was Philippines the richest country in Asia just before Marcos took over.

Why did South Korea and Taiwan subsequently leapfrog over the Philippines.

Why did so much Japanese investment money go to Thailand and Malaysia instead of Philippines.

It all has to do with the system of elites in the Philippines, which is a product of colonialism, but still, unique to the Philippines.

The US, South Korea and Taiwan are every bit as corrupt but income was more equitably distributed, as a result of land reform in S Korea and Taiwan, so a substantial middle class was formed.

Land reform was promised after the people power revolution in the Philippines, but the elites never let it happen.

[shance]

62. Thank you JC*** Another great post.

n/t