One example of the work of Canadian Trotskyists that is not well known is the deep connections and friendships Ruth and Reg Bullock had with Native groups and militants on the (Vancouver) North Shore, in the Squamish-Whistler area, and on the north bank of the Fraser Valley, particularly around Mission. This work was not a formal party assignment or priority, but they made it an important part of their political work. Reg was deeply interested in the history and heritage of Native groups in B.C. and particularly the nations along the Pacific Coast and on the main offshore islands (Vancouver Island and the Charlottes, the latter being the home base of the Haida nation. Their work and the experiences I had with them among Native people is what sparked my own interest in this continental struggle. I had many occasions to recall their work when I helped to found an indigenous and Black university in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast autonomous regions in the mid nineties I spent eight years working in the area of URACCAN’s international relations, and lobbying for international and national support for this effort to offer higher education in indigenous and Black communities, led by indigenous and Black educators and administrators.

I did not introduce the quotations from Mandel in order to argue that he had a better understanding than Novack of the indigenous struggle and heritage. If anything, my own personal acquaintance with George and his writings would lead me to argue the reverse. The Mandel quotes were intended to help comrades appreciate the fundamental difference between indigenous spirituality and the main Indo-European religions that played an ideological role in justifying patriarchal and class society, and oppression and exploitation of toilers. Indigenous spirituality in Abya Yala is not ideological in that sense, although the aggressive recruitment of Christian and Catholic missionaries has to some degree contaminated that spirituality with western ideological apologetics, especially in terms of how women are envisioned by men (original sin and all that garbage).

I continue to believe that both Mandel and Novack would have benefited from a deeper study of Mariátegui and other Latin American Marxists who followed in his tradition. My last discussion with George was in Mexico City where he went to live after Evelyn Reed’s death. George married a Mexican comrade who was very close to the Mexican section of the FI. On my trips to Canada in the late 80s I had to pass through Mexico City and got to stay with them on one of the trips (I don’t recall the year, but it was a several years before George died in 1992). He was keenly interested in the situation in Nicaragua, and questioned me about many aspects, including a discussion of why the majority of indigenous people had turned against the revolution (they led a war in alliance with the Contras, but their own war for their own demands, that ironically the Nicaraguan right and the Contras actually opposed,, but were largely accepted by the Sandinista government when it made the turn towards autonomy for the Caribbean Coast in 1987).

We should recall, too, that it is only recently that Blanco himself developed a more indigenous-oriented cosmovision that integrates Marxism with indigenous traditions. His book ‘Land or Death’, written in the Sixties has a considerably different focus that his 2003 book’ Nosotros los Indios’ (We Indians). In Land or Death he emphasizes the role of campesinos with little reference to the impact of the fact that they were in their majority indigenous people. The latter book indicates a significant change in his outlook towards placing the indigenous-campesino struggle in a common framework, integrated with the question of defense of Mother Earth (the environment in “western” terminology). This point could be made in a different way. The Hugo Blanco who wrote Land or Death and led a mass movement of campesino-indigenous self defense would have done better had he studied Mariátegui at the time. Hugo knows that very well, and has changed his thinking over the years, especially in response to current indigenous struggles including the struggle in Chiapas and in Bolivia, Ecuador, and of course, Peru.
We are privileged to be able to stand on the shoulders of Marxists like George Novack and Ernest Mandel, as well as the shoulders of Mariátegui and indigenous-campesino leaders such as Hugo Blanco.

But what we are discovering through practice and political work, as well as study, is that the indigenous leaders and thinkers are contributing a great deal to today’s liberation and emancipation struggles, and to our theoretical arsenal. This is obviously the case for the struggle to stop capitalist depredation of the environment (we should note the excellent pedagogical and analytical work the Climate and Capitalism site – published by Ian Angus – has done on this score. But it is just as valid in other arenas of struggle. In Nicaragua the indigenous movement is playing an important role in struggles against hunger and lack of national and local food sovereignty, another wonderful gift of structural readjustment and IMF tutelage.
In Nicaragua, another area where indigenous leadership is important is the women’s movement in the Autonomous Regions, and also the development of a special health system for those regions, that incorporates traditional and western medicine. Indigenous activists and educators also played an important role in developing a special bilingual education model for the autonomous regions.

I think we will be returning to this theme over time based on living and concrete experiences. The most important aspect I would argue is an openness to listen and learn, and not think of ourselves as teachers and leaders in the openings we will encounter. We can be teachers and leaders, but that implies a lot of learning and experience along the way. John Riddell’s article that sparked this discussion is a fine example of that approach that merits emulation.

Phil —- Managua

Phil contrasts this to the limitations of the writings of George Novack on indigenous societies.

After reading Phil’s comments, I reviewed Novack’s pamphlet Genocide Against the Indians, published in 1970, which I think must be taken as his considered and mature view on the question..

On the first page, I found this passage: Native people “want to receive a fair share of the benefits of modern production and civilization but not at the price of the extinction of the virtues and values of their distinctive way of life.” For Novack, this task of preservation of the “virtues and values” of traditional Indigenous society is at the heart of the demand for Native self-determination. This is basically the same idea argued by Hugo Blanco and by every revolutionary indigenous fighter I have encountered.

That passage is from the introduction, written in 1970. The body of the pamphlet consists of articles written in 1948. They read very well today—an eloquent celebration of the successes and merits of indigenous society and denunciation of the brutality of capitalism. The articles do not, however, deal with the prospects and program for indigenous resistance in our epoch.

There was no question in those days where our sympathies lay as Marxists in the historical contest between settler colonialism and Native resistance. That’s why Novack’s pamphlet had the Sioux resistance leader Sitting Bull on its cover, and when the League for Socialist Action in the 1960s named its vacation camp Poundmaker, after a leader of the Native war of resistance on the prairies in 1885. In those years, we viewed indigenous resistance as a precursor of and inspiration for workers’ struggle today.

But on a theoretical level, matters were more confused. There are statements in our writings from those years saying that sweeping aside the Indigenous pre-class society on this continent was one of the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. And bourgeois revolution is a process that Marxists regard as progressive. The U.S. newspaper The Militant has developed the erroneous side of these old statements along the lines that theft of Native lands was progressive. For a very helpful discussion of this debate by Louis Proyect, see http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2004w04/msg00230.htm.

To refute this misunderstanding of Marxism, it is helpful to understand that there is more than one way for the rise of capitalism to take place, and we identify with the efforts of workers and farmers through history to secure a path of capitalist development more favourable to their interests. Thus Lenin before 1917, in discussing the road forward for Russian agriculture, said it could take either the American road (a free peasantry) or the Prussian road (the peasants dispossessed and converted into agricultural labourers); he favoured a struggle for the American road. He might also have made reference to the French road (the revolution established a free peasantry) or the British road (the peasants were dispossessed). In fact, of course, with regard to the land question the Russian revolution of 1917 took a distinctive Russian road (a free peasantry with communal landholding).

But in relationship to the Indigenous struggle, the important point is that the “American road” – the free peasantry of Canada and the U.S. — did not fall from the sky and was not “inevitable”—it was won through the class struggle. The 1837 uprising in Canada contributed to this outcome. But it was won only for the European settlers. After the U.S. Civil War, the ex-slaves made a great bid to become free peasants, but were defeated. Marxists of course were on the side of the Blacks—the social benefits of emancipated farming should have been made available to Blacks as well as Whites.

And what about the Indigenous peoples, who at the very moment of Black Reconstruction were making their final great bid to rescue land and freedom from the grip of settler colonialism, in a wave of struggles that included the 1885 rebellion in Canada? The Indigenous peoples were farmers too – America’s first farmers and pioneer agronomists – and fishers, hunters, and experts in harvesting the natural resources of the land. Why should they not also have been permitted to hold land in self-governing communities, where communal values could be preserved? How would this have obstructed progress?

Wherever in the Americas the Indigenous people were able to preserve significant portions of their heritage and land, the results for both Native and settler society and for the struggle of all working people today have been overwhelmingly positive.

I am not trying here to debate the might-have-beens of history or argue whether or not the devastation of Native society was inevitable. What is important is that in any process of bourgeois revolution and capitalist development, Marxism always defends the struggle of the exploited and oppressed, including Indigenous peoples.

John

In the course of my work in collaboration with Peruvian indigenous and campesino leader Hugo Blanco, a Marxist friend wrote, in the framework of an internet discussion list, a posting that expressed a concern that solidarity with indigenous struggles often passes over into idealist and ineffective nostalgia for a “return to nature,” for times past that cannot ever be again. He was concerned that we would end up denying “progressive” aspects of the history of imperialist expansion (such as the current revolutionary impact of the Black minority in the United States) by a misdirected effort to turn back the clock of history.

I responded with the following message, obviously edited to remove references to other individuals involved in a multi person exchange, and for space reasons.

Felipe Stuart C.
Managua

Neither Hugo Blanco nor I have argued for a nostalgic return to the good old days of an imagined primitive communism or even to the pre-Conquest days.

Hugo is very explicit on that question.

He says we do not want to return to the past. We want – he explains – to know and honor our past and take from it essential elements to struggle today for our future.

The essential elements he points to are the communistic traditions of social organization and the respect and love of nature – an integral cosmovision whose essential core can lay the basis for a new morality and cultural mode in the socialist transformation of our continent.

Mariátegui was one of the first Marxists in the western hemisphere to break from schematism, and to appreciate the contribution that indigenous traditions and culture could make to the anti-imperialist and anti- capitalist struggle in Indo-America, and to social transformation beyond capitalism.

I think Eurocentric Marxism and to some degree the Marxism taught by George Novack (a longtime leader of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party … lacks the benefit of Mariátegui’s contribution. We should recall that Mariátegui made this advance without the benefit of Marx’s ethnography notebooks and recent discussions of his nuanced and dialectical appreciation of the potential role of the Russian peasant commune. But he did have before him the revolutionary shift in Bolshevik policy on the nationalities question when they broke completely with pre-1917 schemas and embraced the national minorities, Islamic religious and cultural rights, autonomy for Soviet Jews, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong — I deeply respect George Novack’s contribution and consider his writings to be indispensable tools in ongoing socialist educational work. Some of his writings on combined and uneven development are crucial to unraveling some of the tightest knots in understanding Indo-Afro-Latin American history, especially the false debate about feudal or capitalist social relations in colonial times. But a good dose of Mariátegui would have enabled George to avoid some pitfalls [a Google search for George Novack and/or Pathfinder Press will turn up quite a number of his books and essays].

The notion that the defeat of the ancient commune and the rise of class society were inevitable and progressive is one sided and ultimately false.

Ernest Mandel addresses that question in the Chapter on Labour, Necessary Product, Surplus Product of his major two-volume work Marxist Economic Theory. After describing the progressive functions of the “new possessing classes,” he makes the following observation:

“The technique of accumulation has been used to justify the appropriation of extensive material privileges. Even if it be historically indispensable, there is no reason to believe that it could not have been applied eventually by the collectivity itself” (p. 41, 1971 Merlin edition).

The shattering of the ancient commune and the forging of class society, exploitation and oppression, and the rise of the state were not inevitable.

Mandel also notes:

“The Marxist category of ‘historical necessity’ is moreover much more complex that popularisers commonly suppose. It includes, dialectically, both the accumulation of the social surplus which was carried out by the ancient ruling classes, and also the struggle of the peasants and slaves against these ruling classes, a struggle without which the fight for emancipation waged by the modern proletariat would have been infinitely more difficult” (p. 42, 1971 Merlin edition).

[We might now want to change his sentence to read: “the fight waged by the modern proletariat and subjugated semi-colonial and indigenous peoples would have been infinitely more difficult” (FSC)].

No serious modern thinker would express nostalgia for the conditions of existence of pre-class communal tribal life, or yearn for a return to such days. But, as Blanco argues, elements of that tradition survived and became central to indigenous cosmovision in Abya Yala (the Americas) and today are central to their resistance to imperialist and capitalist domination, and to their defense of nature against capitalist depredation.

Mandel makes an interesting point that relates to this discussion:

“It is only when the division of society into classes begins, when the social division of labour, and the need to justify exploitation appears, that ideology in the sense of ‘bad conscience’ can arise. The old mentality, based on primitive clan communism, slowly dissolves. But its vitality remains very great, and thousands of years have to pass before the last traces of these feelings of elementary solidarity disappear. It is, moreover, by utilizing these feelings of solidarity and co-operative discipline within a communistic society that the first ideologists in the service of the ruling classes endeavour to persuade the working classes to accept their situation of permanent inferiority. This is the ‘organic’ conception of society, which is worked out in order to justify a social division of labour identified with the division of society into rich and poor, privileged persons and producers, those who give orders and those who obey them.”

[At that point, Mandel offers an insightful footnote about Karl Polanyi’s fascination with naturalism. “A curious echo of this ‘organic conception of society is to be found in the writings of certain modern critics of economic liberalism, such as Karl Polanyi. The latter treats even slave owning society as a society which ‘integrated the individual into society’ and makes no distinction between the way a free member of a village community saw his position and the way this position appeared to a slave or a serf.”

……

We should also note that this line of thought is directly related to the historical role of religion. The rise of Christianity is propelled both by a social movement against slavery and oppression, and in a dialectical progression, the imposition of the naturalist ideology discussed by Mandel. But it remains to this day, also the “sigh of the oppressed”. Ditto for the Muslim faith, and many others.

The spiritualism of indigenous peoples is different. It is not ideological. It did not arise to justify or to camouflage exploitative and alienating social relations. Mandel also explains this difference very succinctly and well by in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 18, The Origin, Rise and Withering Away of Political Economy (Op cit., p. 690).

In today’s world of imperialist subjugation and capitalist destruction of the very material conditions of life (the environment), indigenous spiritualist cosmovision takes on a revolutionary potential when integrated into the international proletarian and plebian struggle for socialism.

I was puzzled by your court summary of how the Aztec empire was supposedly destroyed by a couple of hundred Spanish soldiers. Similar arguments are made about the defeat of the Inca, although it took the Conquistadores a bit longer and cost them much more to occupy the Andes. However, the military relationship of forces is only part of the explanation of the historical catastrophe of the European conquest, as seen from the point of view of the original inhabitants of Abya Yala. The main factor was not force of arms, but disease.

…………..

We do not weep or even sigh about the conquest, although sighs can be healthy and positive, and even weeping at times. But we do rejoice at the great and powerful resistance struggles. We do celebrate 500 years of Indigenous, Black, and Grassroots Resistance (I was one of the central organizers of the huge conference on that theme held in Managua the week of October 12, 1992 attended (it now seems ironic) by a young indigenous militant from Bolivia by the name of Evo Morales, and by Rigoberta Menchu who had just received the Nobel Peace award).

So I would like to turn your apparently ambiguous attitude towards indigenous tradition into an active pursuit of a great tradition, a cultural “rescate” (recovery).

I am reminded of the assertive words on the license plate in Quebec — Je me souviens (I remember); or Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie. It has been put to song in dozens of interpretations and formed the basis of novels and stories (see http://www.cyberacadien.com/?p=40).

Is it reactionary for the Quebecois or the Acadien to yearn for the times before the British conquest?

When we do that are we yearning to go back to feudalism, indentured labor, and survival farming in a climate and geography we poorly understood? I don’t think that is what characterizes these cultural expressions, any more than Hugo Blanco’s arguments are part of a movement to go back to a “Native” world of times past. They are assertions of pride in and for the oppressed and suppressed culture, for the language and song of the oppressed, for our traditions, for our elders and ancestors, for the blood of our resistance to conquerors and imperialists then and now. For our liberation! …………. (fin)