142290 Henk adresses his Dutch queen: Letter to Dutch Minister Vermeend and Queen Beatrix: All not responded. Subject: unemployment 28th of August 1999 Dear Mr. Vermeend, My name is Henk ..., I'm 35 years old and already searching for 8 years to get a decent job. I haven't scored anything, not even with all the beautiful profits in our economy. At the time, in 1992, I graduated as an environmental educator, but I couldn't find a job. After a while, it finally seemed to be there, around september '99. At that time I could do an internet project with a job guarantee that was financed by the European Social Foundation and it was in co-operation with the employment office. I've put a lot of signatures on an agreement that told me that would have to give full co-operation with the threat of shortening and stopping my alimony. This despite the fact that was the one who wanted to start this project in the first place, the employment office first wanted me to do some tests. I think that an agreement only works out if both sides follow the rules. In mean while that I continued the project, the "but's" and "maybe's" came to show up about the job guarantee. Looking back, it only gave me a ticket to aid instead of the promised job. From the 22 participants, only four got a job and three didn't even got the training course! Now, three hundred requests further, I still don't have a job. Once I got to the aid, I got a brochure with information about appropriate jobs. In that brochure they explained that if you couldn't find a job in 6 months, that any job would be appropriate. But they don't give an explanation for the fact how it is possible to not find a job after 6 months of searching for one. I don't expect that, if you don't find a job during six months of requests, you would find one while working in a factory. My questions are: Do I, a high educated man, have to work in a factory for the rest of my life, doing non-educated work? That isn't reasonable at all, is it? The same with the fact that they attract thousands of foreigners to work in the IT-business, wherefore unemployed people get rejected every time. That isn't reasonable either! I did accept charity work and also a lot of "non-appropriate" work, through factory and meat factory's to WIW*. Conclusion: Jealous colleagues didn't accept me and the bosses weren't waiting for me either. One of the bosses was honest enough to admit that he couldn't understand what I was doing there at all. Honestly, I didn't knew either! I also know a lot of story's from other unemployed people who got more and more problems after several hundred of requests. It's the same with me, I'm searching like crazy to get a job, I adjust myself and even then the bosses don't want me because of the poverty of experience that I have. I keep falling back and back in the misery of the aid... It would change a lot if you would finally see that your politics of the devil frustrates in stead of stimulates and that is morally rejectable. Keeping the payment low to stimulate people to get a job is just a story from people who have no idea what they're talking about! There's no way to defend the fact that work which I'm totally not capable to do, is remark as "appropriate" work. A couple of years ago hundred thousands of people had put their signature to get a structural increase of the payments. They've never listened like they've never asked for the opinions of the unemployed people. Still, as a christian, I ask you once again for your help to get a structural increase of the payments and wages for the WIW* and ID people and to give a financial compensation for all the years that we've lost. Because, if there is so much work, why are there still WIW* and ID jobs? I also want to ask to maintain and fortify the concept "appropriate" work and to influence the concept of employers so that they accept protracted unemployed people, putting limitations on the flexibility of the work and do what they've promised; a right to a well paid appropriate job for everyone that is unemployed. I also would like to have a personal conversation with you, preferably with the presence of the press. Finally, as an add to this letter, the fact of the arbitrary with which they put the unemployed people in Category D or Phase 4 at the employment office. This means that it is impossible to mediate you while there is still the obligation of searching for a job. But in fact they make you incapable to work and the question still stands if this is legally right? With regards, Henk 1 year later: A box full of rejections! The club of requesting says I'll stay unemployed in the near future... I have to adjust myself to that. *WIW: Unemployed Reïntegration Law. anaisnin.cjb.net ------------------- Chuck Zero versus Marc Cooper From: Louis Proyect Subject: Chuck Zero versus Marc Cooper Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2002 11:31:23 -0800 (Comrades might recall Marc Cooper's visit here a while back. Not only did he align himself with the Pacifica hijackers, he has been shifting to the right on a consistent basis with all of the other Nation Magazine muck-a-mucks--Henwood, Hitchens and company. Henwood posted a screed of Cooper's against the US left to LBO-Talk that was supposedly a report on Porto Alegre. Chuck "Zero" Munson, who is to the Internet for anarchism, as I am for Marxism, wrote a nifty reply to Cooper that appears below.) Doug Henwood wrote: > > > > L.A. Weekly - February 8 - 14, 2002 > > Left With Hope > Some un-American thoughts from Brazil on global Justice > > by Marc Cooper > ------------ Let's face it, LBOers, Marc Cooper is a jerk and a self-important scumbag. ANy of you want to take bar bets with me on when he completely sells out and starts writing for Front Page magazine? Ah yes, I know Marc's ilk very well. Older white guys from the Old New Left. Very likely to flag down the nearest cute activist at some activist meeting and ask them to get him a drink. All the time passing out his card to people to let them know that he is a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE. As if anybody cares. > PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL -- AFTER SPENDING last week here with 50,000 > others at the World Social Forum -- what the press has dubbed the > "anti-globalization summit" -- it would be easy to make fun of the > guy who was wearing a red-and-blue Che Guevara cape. Or the guy named Marc Cooper who was masquerading as a self-important LEFTIST WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE. > Or the clumps of balding, middle-aged Belgians and Danes with Che > T-shirts stretched across their paunches as they ambled about in > short pants, black socks, and sandals. Or the little bottles of local > rotgut booze for sale re-labeled with, yes, images of Che. Or the > crudely drawn and even more primitively translated wall propaganda > posters shrieking that the "Yankee state is worldwide center of > outrage, torture, strokes, [sic] bombardments, militar [sic] > interventions and slaughter of innocent millions." Or the scraggly > squads of "reporters" from various "indymedia" centers, frenetically > capturing one another on video- and audiotape that they earnestly > post on Web sites read only by themselves. -------- Are we beginning to sense a trend here? After everything that has been said about Cooper and Pacifica, are his fangs not dripping with contempt for the independent media. Of course, when you are an olf left authoritarian, the existence of a vibrant, indie left press is anethma to pricks who think that being a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE has elevated them to some kind of Leftist rock star status. full: http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0202/0521.html ------------- Or that the feverish rock-star welcoming rained on Noam Chomsky by an > auditorium full of screaming fans swarming for his autograph made you > cringe and wonder if the 73-year-old MIT professor would reciprocate > by tossing a sweat-soaked handkerchief out to the front row. Cooper's just jealous and he sounds just like David Horowitz here. That writer spot for Cooper at Front Page is getting warmer. > But to focus on any of the above would be misleading. Those antics > were strictly trivial and mostly amusing sideshows. This second > annual World Social Forum, organized as a grassroots alternative to > the elite World Economic Forum in New York, turned out to be a > refreshingly serious and sober five days of discussion, debate and > meditation over the meaning of the global-justice movement and where > it is heading in the post-9/11 world. It's all good to have things like the WSF, but there were people who came to New York last week to have that same discussion. > In other words, delightfully little of that burdensome, depressing > crapola that you could certainly expect when you lock up several > thousand American activists in a couple of big lecture halls for five > or six days. Cooper doesn't get around much, does he. He obviously missed the exicting National Conference on Organized Resistance which happened at American Univeristy several weeks ago. This was their fifth annual conference, which has grown to be so big that it has 6 concurrent tracks and over 1000 attendees. All of it is run by students. > The World Social Forum survived the entire week with > none of the usual circular firing squads our American left has become > so expert at organizing. No Women's Caucus, or African-American > Caucus, or Latino Caucus, or AsianPacific Islander Caucus, or LGBT > Caucus spontaneously formed to exhibit its "outrage" over the lack or > excess of -- fill in the blank -- within the Forum organization. > ------------- Mercifully, no gruesome game playing of Who's the Bigger Victim? I'm sure that many of us get tired of these excesses, but to dismiss these concerns liek Cooper has just demonstrates that he is a loudmouth white guy who doesn't have time for other voices than his own. Perhaps he can give up his slot at The Nation for writer who is a person of color. Cooper's contempt for the concerns of women and people of color suffuse this odious piece of writing. > No process-freak crybabies whining about too much hierarchy or too > many experts on the dais (I don't know about you, but when I sit for > hours at a stretch to hear a panel of speakers, they better damn well > be experts). What an arrogant fucker, this Cooper is. I'm sure that he thinks that having a platform filled with smart white guys is something that everybody can live with. Whining about hierarchy. Wanting more experts. I smell an authoritarian of the Old Left variety. Open up the windows folks! We've got a big white dinosaur in the room who just happens to be a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE! -------> No trust-funder Black Blocers in ski masks claiming to > be smashing international capitalism by breaking the windows of a > Starbucks. Cooper should get a job with the NY Post, or perhaps as a press attache for Susan George. It's really pathetic to hear this stereotyping coming from a purported leftist. Trust fund black blocers? They don't exist. This is a real insult to the poor working class people who participate in the black bloc. The only black bloc in Porto Alegre was the anarchists from Brazil, Aregentina, and South America. I'm sorry, but we American black bloc types could barely afford to get to New York City. Who went to Brazil from America? Mostly the NGO folks. ----------> No Food Police forcing tofu lunches on you. Oh, poor Marc, he rejects free healthy food, for what? Cheetos out of the vending machine? > Or Nicotine > Nazis snuffing out your ciggies. And, praise Jesus, none of that damn > "twinkling" going on -- the infantile and wholly idiotic process now > in vogue among American activists whereby they raise their hands and > wiggle their fingers to show approval of what's being said in one of > their endless, process-laden, mind-deadening meetings. That's because those meetings are democratic and strive towards an egalitarian, non-hierarchical movement. Not exactly something that an old authoritarian dinosaur like Cooper would appreciate. > Maybe this World Social Forum conducted itself with such studious > maturity because it was organized and dominated not by Americans, but > by Latin Americans and Europeans. ------- This group probably included some of the Latin Americans that we were trying to bring to Washington last September for our counter-summit. It was a big fight to get some of the leftist men to realize that panels and plenaries filled with famous white American leftist men was hardly representative of the global movement. Of course, Cooper rejects this as he has explained above .------------ > The history of both groups has > taught them that politics is a deadly serious business and that you > better get it right. For when you screw up, the consequences can be > devastating and include getting tied to an iron mattress with an > electrode connected to your scrotum, or becoming one more number in, > say, the Holocaust. That sort of experience leaves little time for > sloshing around in the preferred American sandbox of identity > politics or fancying yourself as some sort of historic martyr because > the Seattle Police Department made you cry with a whiff of tear gas, > or confusing some dimwitted, mildly dangerous, yick-yack like John > Ashcroft for a real, live "fascist." ------------ Yeah, and some of us were taking a real risk last weekend by organizing a protest that the WEF was hoping would be unpopular. The police had made plans to use wtaer cannons against us if we got rowdy. The WEF and the ruling class set down a challenge to the American wing of the anti-globalization movement by holding the meeting in New York. Who stepped up to that challenge? The anarchists, socialists, and many other folks in the movement. Who jet-setted off to Brazil for the nice summer weather of the WSF? The NGOs, the liberals, and future Front Page Magazine writers like Marc Cooper -----------. > Writing in last week's The Nation magazine, one of the Forum > organizers, Paris-based author Susan George, confessed that after > September 11 she had hoped that the leadership of the wealthy > countries of the world would begin taking global inequity more > seriously. But, she wrote, that was naive. "Those who hold our > futures in their hands are not serious. They see no farther than the > noses of their bombers," George wrote. "Frightening though the > prospect may seem, citizens must accept the risk of being serious in > their place." >------ > WOW, WHAT A GREAT LINE: THE RISK OF BEING serious. --------- That challenge was > bravely assumed this past week here in Porto Alegre. Some 15,000 > "delegates," and an equal number or more of "guests," filled one > Forum venue after another, from 8 in the morning until late into the > night, listening, learning, reflecting, taking notes and asking smart > questions.-------  Attending a big conference is a low risk activity which can either be serious, boring, funny, educational or whatever. I have no problems with those who attended the conference, but scumbags like Cooper are beyond the pale. For him to make fun of American leftists who managed to organize 20,000 people on short notice to brave water cannons in New York City is pretty sick. --------- > The intellectual menu offered up was simply staggering. Hundreds of > seminars, conferences, workshops and panel discussions held > throughout the city filled a 155-page tabloid-size guide. Some > overflowed university auditoriums with 3,000 seats. Others took place > in small classrooms. If you didn't want to join the throngs > worshiping Chomsky, Again with the worries about Chomsky being worshipped. Marc Cooper, meet your new boss, David Horowitz. >you could go next door and hear from Indian > activist Vandana Shiva; or Philippine economist Walden Bello, who > dared to sketch a new, alternative international financial > architecture; or a panel of Argentine trade unionists; or Asian > water-rights activists; or some stunningly well-prepared > presentations from the Americans who did show up -- a wonderful > deconstruction of the WTO by Public Citizen's Lori Wallach or a > detailed critique of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas by > Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies. ------------- Ah so Marc is confirming that the chickens in the American NGO community did go down to Brazil. Well, at least Michael Dolan made it to New York. > Five times as many people attended this year's Forum as did last > year. The U.S. delegation was the fifth biggest, with more than 400 > representatives; last year, only a few showed up. And labor-backed > groups, such as Jobs With Justice, went out of their way to bring > along some of the more engaged U.S. activists and leave behind, well > ---------. . . the more self-absorbed wankers. The self-absorbed wankers who managed to organize a weekend of protest that drew 20,000 people. A group of self-absorbed wankers who stood up to the bullshit that our movement had gone away and organized something that belied that crap. Yes, the U.S. delegation was big. It was filled with moral cowards who are more worried about losing their funding than in taking any political risks. -----------------  > "I'm here because I've seen that our more successful campaigns happen > when we tie into what's called 'common rights,'" said Tracy Yassini, > associate director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, one > of the few Angeleno delegates. Her group has been effective in > fighting for a living wage in L.A. and Santa Monica. "Up to now I > haven't been involved in the anti-globalization campaigns," she said. > "But coming out of this Forum now, I feel I have an obligation to get > linked up." > > No blueprints or battle plans came out of the Forum. Everyone takes > back with them whatever they can from a week of intellectual > engagement. And the overall lesson that we always do better when we > stress what unites us rather than what divides us. > > This week's World Social Forum reminded me of what, in the first > place, attracted me to the left as a teenager in the '60s -- the > notion that you were connected to something much bigger and more > important than yourself. And for the first time in a long stretch, > this week's World Social Forum made it feel good again to still be > part of that. By the way, Marc Cooper is a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE. ----------- << Chuck0 >> Infoshop.org -> http://www.infoshop.org/ Alternative Press Review -> http://www.altpr.org/ Practical Anarchy Online -> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/ Anarchy: AJODA -> http://www.anarchymag.org/ MutualAid.org -> http://www.mutualaid.org/ Factsheet 5 -> http://www.factsheet5.org/ AIM: AgentHelloKitty Web publishing and services for your nonprofit: Bread and Roses Web Publishing http://www.breadandrosesweb.org/ "Chuck Munson isn't like other protestors." -- CTV Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org --------------- In "Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World" (Yale University Press, $45), Jonathan M. Bloom traces the history of paper, as well as of writing itself. Any such account involves the cultures that use paper, what they used it for, and how paper so shaped history that it can seem to be identical with civilization. Paper is vegetable fiber soaked to a pulp and dried in thin sheets. Its origins in China go back so far that they have become lost in myth. It was invented as wrapping (the paper bag precedes the New York Times, Chinese Kleenex precedes the Analects of Confucius, and fastidious Chinese aristocrats had toilet paper in 600 A.D.). For the first 3,000 years of writing, clay tablets, bamboo strips, and papyrus (a kind of paper) served for letters, government documents, and drawing. The craft of papermaking spread from China along the Great Trade Route. This diffusion was the work of western Islam, in Persia and Afghanistan. Although the Koran was piously transcribed only onto parchment (usually sheepskin), it was eventually written on paper as copies to be memorized by students. For centuries the Koran could not be printed, partly because the calligraphy in which it is written is an integral part of its beauty. Gibbon laments that we got gunpowder from China when we could have had paper and printing. When Gutenberg invented movable type, paper was still considered a tacky surface for writing. The hand-copied manuscript book on vellum was what the Middle Ages considered "a book." The Medicis would not allow a printed book into their libraries, even when Venetian, Dutch, and German presses were printing the most beautiful books the world has ever seen. Professor Bloom's study is focused on Islamic writing, as that is where paper evolved a culture of all but unimaginable splendor in calligraphy and the illuminated manuscript. Baghdad was the center of civilized writing: poetry, theology, science, history, cartography, medicine, and narrative prose—the Thousand and One Nights, for example. Paper Before Print is a sumptuous book: 8K by 11 inches, beautifully illustrated, lucidly written, and meticulously researched: its bibliography runs to thirteen pages. There are sidebars in the margins that go into erudite technologies. This is a book to put on your shelf beside Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1940 in French; 1953, English) and George Sarton's magisterial Introduction to the History of Science (1927). These three studies rectify our traditional notion that Western civilization jumped from Greece and Rome into the Renaissance and modern times. It was, rather, passed on to us by Islam, enriched and sophisticated, and on paper. (from a review in the March 2002 Harper's) -------------------------- Before turning to the matter at hand, I want to remind comrades why I write about such seemingly obscure topics like the Cherokee removal policy. In fact these questions are not just of historical interest. They reverberate today and have enormous implications for radicals throughout the New World. While posing important strategic and tactical questions, they also confront Marxism with unresolved theoretical issues that were inherited from the rather incomplete investigations that Marx pursued in his Ethnological notebooks. They also stick out like sore thumbs from Engels's "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State." While written entirely in sympathy with the plight of precapitalist social formations, they carry with them the heavy legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan's ethnology. Despite his enlightened attitudes, Morgan could not really transcend his epoch. The notion of successive, linear stages of barbarism, savagery, slavery, feudalism, etc. carries the heavy stamp of 18th and 19th century social science. Marxism still has a challenge before it to fully engage with the remnants of indigenous societies without the heavy hand of "stagism". It needs to take into account the kind of work done by people like Boas, but in addition it has to come to terms with much more profound questions on the nature of "progress" and "civilization". A fully developed Marxism will, in my opinion, have to emerge as a critique of civilization in the sense of Thomas Patterson's 1997 MR book "Inventing Western Civilization" that I reviewed for Science and Society. Unfortunately, Science and Society, Monthly Review, Against the Current, New Left Review and New Politics--the premier general interest scholarly publications of the left--have not had a SINGLE issue dealing with indigenous society or struggles in the 10 years or so that I have been reading them. This reflects poorly on the left. The final chapter of Anthony Wallace's "The Long Bitter Trail" is packed with material that helps us to understand the intellectual and political framework that helped to shape the thinking of Marx and Engels on such questions. Marx and Engels both valued the work of Lewis Henry Morgan highly, who represents the best and the not so best aspects of social science and white progressivist thinking on the Indian question. As Hunter Gray pointed out, racism does not create inequality. Instead, it is the ideological encrustation that grows out of social inequality. Man feels the need to explain why one group suffers while another group prospers. It goes against the grain of Christian morality to say that the Indian had to be treated as less than human because he stood in the way of white greed. Instead, apologists figure out a way to explain genocide in terms of a neutral "science". The Indian had to be kicked out of Georgia because he was lower on the evolutionary scale rather than because he was sitting on land that could be used to grow cotton. In the 1840s and 1850s, one such "scientific" theory was based on polygenism, which asserted the racial inferiority of both Indians and Blacks. Philadelphia physician and phrenologist Samuel G. Morton wrote: "Was it not for this same mental superiority, these happy climes which we now inhabit would not be possessed by the wild and untutored Indian, and that soil which now rejoices in the hearts of millions of freemen, would not be overrun by the lawless tribes of contending barbarians." Morton's "theory" was based on the examination of hundreds of native skulls which he rated as more capacious than blacks, but less so than whites. Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, one of Morton's disciples, asserted that the black cranium housed a brain no larger than the "imperfect brain of a 7 month's infant in the womb of the white." With this kind of racism enshrined at places like Harvard University, the infant science of ethnology would be ill equipped to treat Indians as equal human beings. We discover from Wallace that there is a direct lineage between Lewis Cass and Lewis Henry Morgan. While less disposed to the sort of phrenological analyses found in Agassiz and company, the early ethnologists all subscribed to the notion that Indians had to be suppressed because their "hunting" based societies were a threat to the advancement of civilization. Henry R. Schoolcraft was an aide to Lewis Cass in Michigan, who studied Indian languages, customs and traditions in the interest of scientifically classifying a species that would soon be extinct. In 1845, Schoolcraft gave a lecture at the club Lewis Henry Morgan had organized in Rochester, New York for the scientific study of indigenous peoples. There is little doubt that Cass's influence was transmitted to Morgan through Schoolcraft who published "Notes on the Iroquois" in 1847. Indeed, Morgan invited Cass to become a member of his Rochester club of Iroquoianists. Showing Cass's influence, Morgan wrote in "League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois": "The passion of the red man for the hunter life has proved to be a principle too deeply inwrought, to be controlled by efforts of legislation. His government, if one was sought to be established, must have conformed to this irresistible tendency of his mind, this inborn sentiment; otherwise it would have been disregarded. The effect of this powerful principle has been to enchain the tribes of North America to their primitive state." Where Morgan differed from Cass--thankfully--was over the removal policy. He believed that as long as efforts were sustained to civilize the Indian, he could remain in his homeland. Of course, this assumed that civilization was required. Looking back over the past 150 years, one might say that the Cherokee had a much more advanced civilization than the white plantation owners who sought to remove them to what would become Oklahoma. Whatever differences Cass, Schoolcraft and Morgan had over this or another question of policy, they were united as members of and in identifying with the intellectual agenda of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, which persisted well into the 20th century. In this edifice, the notion of progressive stages of cultural evolution held sway. And it was the theoretical orientation of the BAE that eventually shaped legislation that would sustain the genocidal practices of the previous three centuries and which continues today. One Smithsonian researcher wrote the introduction to a policy study of Indian land claims, which strongly supported the following words that originally appeared in an 1823 Supreme Court ruling on Indian land titles: "discovery [by Europeans] gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest . . . We will not enter into the controversy, whether agriculturists, merchants, and manufacturers, have a right on abstract principle, to expel hunters from the territory they possess, or to contract their limits . . . The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest." Unless Marxism finds a way to disassociate itself from any expressions that even faintly reflect such sentiments, it surely has no future in this hemisphere. -- Louis Proyect, lnp3?X0040;panix.com on 02/28/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org ------------------------ I do think a lot of racism is cognitive dissonance in action. When there are patent contradictions between facts vs belief, belief vs emotions/interests, or emotions/interests vs facts there is dissonance in need of some kind of resolution--not only for personal psychological reasons, but also for social structures of accumulation/expanded reproduction reasons. In the conditions of oppression faced by Indians--and other "minorities" who are "invisible"--many of the concentrated expressions and raw contradictions/instruments of oppression of capitalism and capitalist imperatives are naked, open and quite revealed--there is little of the "velvet glove" covering the iron fist. In this arena, there is fertile ground not only for exposing the barbarism of capitalism or radicalizing Indians, there is also fertile ground for radicalizing non-Indians who fail to see the barbarism of capitalism in their own lives or spheres of existence but can be made to see it all when exposed to Indian Country and the realities there--where capitalism is quite open, naked and openly barbaric in ways that the non-Indian world does not experience unless it is all coming down. Jim C. ------------- Louis wrote: This is a crucial point. Wallace argues that the state of Georgia decided to move ahead with Indian removal--with Jackson's blessing--shortly after the Cherokee began to assert its nationhood: >>The economic progress and increasing literacy of the so-called Civilized Tribes was bad enough in the eyes of Southern whites. But worse than all this, in Georgia's eyes, was a change in the form of government adopted by the Cherokees in emulation of federal political institutitions [which I might add where influenced strongly by the Iroquois constitution]. In 1817, the Cherokees had established a bicameral legislature, a chief executive, a judiciary, and a small army [and without having read Lenin!]. The legislature passed dozens of laws regulating marriage, the tribal treasury, the whiskey trade, legal contracts, and so forth. And in 1827, that legislature adopted a new, written constitution adopted a new, written constitution (including a bill of rights), modeled after the Constitution of the United States. This constitution asserted that the Cherokee nation was "sovereign and independent."<< Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org In the debates of the U.S. Congress just prior to ending "Treaties" in 1871 and calling all future "agreements" with Indian nations just that--"agreements"--and refusing to use the term "treaty", there was an explicit recognition that even under international law at the time, as well as under the U.S. Constitution itself ( Article I Section 10 and Article VI Section 2) that treaties are only covenants between sovereign nations and the mere construction and signing of a Treaty implied recognition of the sovereignty and independence (and later right to self-determination) and nationhood of the treating parties. The U.S. Government sought to summarily wipe out nationhood, sovereignty and independence of Indigenous nations by simply refusing to call treaties treaties rather summarily calling them "agreements." International law, unlike domestic law--particularly that based on English common law--evolves and is codified much more through "customary practices" and treaties than through constitutional interpretations, treaties, statutes, judicial decisions and stare decisis (case law) or executive/administrative orders/fiat as is the case in domestic law. Further, according to Article VI Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution: Treaties shall be considered supreme law of the land and the judges of every state shall be bound thereby ANYTHING IN THE CONSTITUTION OR THE LAWS OF ANY STATE TO THE CONTRARY NOTWITHSTANDING.(paraphrase). After World War I there was talk of putting the Germans and Turks on trial for war crimes, crimes against "minority" populations etc based on emerging international conventions and laws governing warfare, treatment of captives etc. The so-called Western powers knew very well, and explicitly laid it out that they too could be subject to the same precedents they were contemplating setting against the Germans and Turks. That is the major reason no war crimes trials developed. In 1924, later codified in 1928 the U.S. passed the Indian Citizenship Act summarily declaring/imposing without consent, "citizenship" on American Indians. Further, where the early Marshall decisions had referred to Indian "nations" (assumed to be dependent and captive with very limited sovereignty), by the 1870s there was less and less use of the term "nations" and more and more use of the term "Tribes" in reference to whole groups of Indians. Canadas also began the same process in the 1920s but did not consumate full "citizenship" until the 1960s. The intent was clear and it was the same intent as that of the nazis who declared that what we do with "our own" minorities within "our" borders is not a matter of international law--or indeed is not anyone else's business; "we" have a sovereign "right" to do genocide. They were also aware that the concept of "Tribes" being sovereign and coverable under international law was not to be found in international law--said to be laws governing contacts, associations, treaties, protections and behaviors of "nations". At Nuremberg, Goering in his lengthy and ranting testimony, along with Streicher, made explicit reference to the fact that the American and Canadian experiences/histories with respect to slaughtering Indians had been the major inspiration for Hitler and the nazis vis-a-vis possible scopes, rationales for and even methods of genocide against the targeted populations by the nazis--he asked why the Western powers with Indigenous populations were not also on trial for their own genocide. This caused the western powers to attempt to shut him up (and even the Soviet judges joined in fearing they had their own problems along these lines). Recently the U.S. government has again been using the term "nations"; their purpose is as disingenuous as when they ceased using the term nations using instead "Tribes". With the grotesque conditions in Indian Country and failures and betrayals of "Trusteeship", they are attempting to dump more and more of the burdens--and blame--back on the Indian nations from failures of the federal trusteeship relationships under the banner of again limited sovereignty--"you want to be a nation and 'sovereign', we'll let you go this far and any failures are your responsibility and yours to fix. That is why--partly--it is not simply a matter of semantics of Tribes versus Nations. Jim Craven ~~~~~~~ ----------- Tribes and Nations From: ermadog Subject: Tribes and Nations Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 02:27:40 -0800 Tribal Social Structures Domnal said: This insight also offers an understanding of the nature of revolutionary behaviour in small rural villages. That it was organised on familial lines, that splits over policy occured along family fault-lines, that bad-practices could come about due to nepotism and the like, that outsiders are never trusted to the second generation. All these things combine with petty localised community loyalties to produce potential difficulties (and also go some way in explaining the strengths) of the movement on a localised scale. I offer this analysis as I feel an understanding of this underlying societal structure is of key importance in enabling theorists to make realistic criticisms of macro-scale strategy. My Reply: I would like to thank you for this post. It illustrates well the dangers of attachment to the parochialism of village life. You have shown us how community ties (coming together for births, etc.) can obscure the existence of deeper divisions. You have also alluded to the hidden decision making process within closed societies (nepotism, in most cases by the Old Families of the village.) The ant-democratic nature of politics in village life is too often ignored by those who like to romanticise the strong sense of community identity in rustic society. Decision-making along lines of personal relationships is not democratic, especially when those relationships are formed by accident of birth. The danger posed by this type of romanticisation lies in the potential for reification of kin-based affiliation behaviours. When tribal, village, or family law lay down the rules for human behaviour, the illustration of which is the function of myth, these familial duties become more important than the individuals, whose worth is judged by the fidelity with which he hews to the party line. These relationships, because they are based on blood, are seen as part of the natural world and therefore stand as Absolutes against the will of the individual. It is within family that we first learn that we can be bought: that we first learn obligation. We discover that, because our families produced us, we are obligated to them from birth. They give us sustenance and life skills, and we must therefore give what they have predetermined is owing. Once we are taught to accept these basic facts of life, we can be coerced or manipulated into following any authority who knows what buttons to push. However, we are not programmable machines. The best laid plans of the status quo don't always work out. Pre-class societies have very limited means of controlling their individual members. Since Marshal Sahlins is a Louis Approved Marxist Anthropologist(Tm), let's turn to him for some insights. This is from _Stone Age Economics_, 1972: Stoneage Economics "Instead of unifying society by sacrificing the autonomy of its producing groups, the division of labor here, as it is principally a division of labor by sex, sacrifices the unity of society to the autonomy of its producing groups. Nor is any higher cause entertained by the household's access to productive resources, or again by the economic priorities codified in domestic pooling. Viewed politically, the DMP is a kind of natural state. Nothing within this infrastructure of production obliges the several household groups to enter into compact and cede each one some part of its autonomy. As the domestic economy is in effect the tribal economy in miniature, so politically it underwrites the condition of primitive society - society without a Sovereign. In principle each house retains, as well as its own interests, all the powers that are wanted to satisfy them. Divided thus into so many units of self-concern, functionally uncoordinated, production by the domestic mode has all the organization of the so many potatoes in a certain famous sack of potatoes." "That is in essence the primitive structure of production. But of course not in appearance. In appearance, primitive society is a poor likeness of primordial incoherence. Everywhere the petty anarchy of domestic production is counterposed by larger forces and greater organization, institutions of social-economic order that join one house to another and submit all to a general interest. Still, these grand forces of integration are not given in the dominant and immediate relations of production. On the contrary, precisely as they are negations of domestic anarchy, they owe part of their meaning and existence to the disorder they would suppress. And if in the end anarchy is banished from the surface of things, it is not definitively exiled. It continues, a persistent disarray lurking in the background, so long as the household remains in charge of production." p. 95 [Note well! Disorder and anarchy of the domestic unit is *suppressed* by the tribal unity! This tribal unity is a fragile thing. JC] He quotes Carneiro: I would like to argue that a factor of greater importance has been the ease and frequency of village fissioning for reasons not related to subsistence[that is, to techniques of subsistence]... In the facility with which the phenomenon occures suggests that villages may seldom get a chance to increase in population to the point at which they begin to press hard on the carrying capacity of the land. The centrifugal forces that cause villages to break apart seem to reach a critical point well before this happens. What the forces are that lead to village fission falls outside the present dicussion. Suffice it to say that many things may give rise to factional disputes within a society, and that the larger the community the more frequent these disputes are likely to be. By the time a village in the Tropical Forest attains a population of 500 or 600 the streses and strains within it are probably such that an open schism, leading to the hiving off of a dissident faction, may easily occur. If internal political controls were strong, a large community might succeed in remaining intact despite factionalism. But chieftanship was notoriously weak among most Amazonian villages, so that the political mechanisms for holding a growing community together in the face of increasingly strong divisive forces were all but lacking (Carneiro, 1968, p. 136). "My point is that primitive society is founded on an economic disconformity, a segmentary fragility that lends itself to and reverberates particular local causes of dispute, and in the absence of "mechanisms for holding a growing community together" realizes and resolves the crisis by fission." p. 98 The strong sense of community that romantics admire is in fact a human artifact called religion. It generates both the fears that inhibit individuals from breaking group solidarity, and the sense of awe that causes individuals to be greatfull for the benefits of membership in the group (into which we were born purely by chance, don't forget.) Pre-class societies solve the problem of real and actual disunity by means of the fissioning process mentioned above. Class societies restrict the movement of individuals so that they are forced to live with irresolvable conflict, lurking beneath an apparently idyllic surface. Religion serves to elevate what would otherwise be naturally arising emotional bonds to stand reified above society as a whole, where they are safeguarded by fictive dead ancestors operating in an imagined spirit world. Throughout the period of the Enlightenment, and well into the 20th. C., romanticists and folklorists mined the cultural remains of what Engels called "the ancient bunk" still extant in the villages and remote corners of Europe. This is a testament not so much to the strength of community spirit as to failure of various ruling classes to incorporate the needs of the toiling masses into their own cultural projects. We know that the early Christianization of Europe had such little impact on rural Europeans that the non-Christians were referred to by a term - "pagan" - that means "rustic" (in a disparaging sense, such as "yokel"). We see that centuries after conversion, kings still counted their descendance from pre-Christian deities and retained Druid counsellors at court. Tribal ways lingered on for centuries. In England, the Anglo-Saxon customs of frankpledge and hue-and-cry were fostered by the newly conquering Normans as a means of social control. The ancient Celtic funerary custom of holding boisterous wakes for the dead lingered on till well into the 14th. C. (and in Ireland, into the 20th. C.) With the advent of the great Celtic Revival, we can see that an impressive amount of this old culture has been preserved. (Who knew there were so many precursors to the Great Pipes? And such a wide range of musical styles?) And in a documentary last year, I saw the last two remaining singers of a 3,000 year Punic dialect. They had no idea what the words meant, had no one to ask for the meaning, and had no one to pass them on to. Has any of these people preserved their ancient tribal "spirit of egalitarianism", which Louis Proyect asserts *must* have existed? The strongest case for preservation of European tribal culture can be made in Ireland. There are a number of historical reasons for this, starting with the failure of Rome to conquer the island. We know from the Roman historians that Ceasar adopted a deliberate policy of destruction of the Druids caste. He recognized that they were the only social element that had the potential to act as a unifying principle for the Celtic tribes. Without an organizing principle, the tribes were never able to present a unified opposition to the Roman army. (Except sporadically, as with Vercingetorix). The Roman Empire collapsed before any serious attempt was made to conquer Ireland. Thus, the Druids were able to put up stiff competition when the Christian missionaries came calling centuries later. A tremendous outpouring of culture was recorded when these latter introduced secular writing methods to the Celtic laity. (For religious reasons, the sacred knowledge of the Druids was never committed to writing) This was a seminal event in the establishment of modern Irish culture, giving us a written record against which to compare the oral tradition.(See my post from last summer "On the Reliability of Oral History".) According to Crossan, the oral tradition died out during his lifetime. I suspect that what Donal is seeing is the customary habit of small lineage groups, unchanged for millenia. The situation was very different in most of North America. Here, once again, I turn to a Louis Approved Marxist Anthropologist(Tm) for advice. This is what Anthony Wallace has to say about the Iroquois (from _ The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca Nation_: The tribes, or nations, had only an uncertain coherence in political matters, and readily split into factions, which might even remove geographically from one another and beome permanent subdivisions. The Seneca, in particular, were divided into two groups: an eastern, pro-British group, and a western, pro-French group (the Geneseo Seneca). The Seneca national council met only occasionally, in the great council house at Canacadea or at another of the nations' towns as circumstances at the time might dictate. The membership of these tribal councils seems to have been simply the sum of all the chiefs of the village councils. [Here follows some discussion of consensus decision-making.] ... Some of the tribal (i.e. village) chiefs and council speakers were chosen as perennial liasion men for dealings between colonial officials, like Sir William Johnson, and their village, factional, tribal, or even the Nations constituencies. They were in this role sometimes referred to as "chiefs to do business," and most of the practical work of administration of policy and formulation and communication of issues was handled by these men rather than by the councils themselves. They were often better known to the whites than the hereditary, or sachem, chiefs. Still, the tribe was essentially not a political organization but a group of villages that spoke the same language. I will not comment on the consensus decision-making - we all hear enough about that when Louis lambastes the anti-globalization anarchists with their affection for consensus. I will, however, comment on an obvious difference between the aboriginal societies and that of the Celts, with their great Druidic colleges. There is simply no evidence that any of the North American tribes had reached this level of development. The caste societies of the Pacific Northwest lacked even the rudimentary government sketched out above for the Iroquois. The closest comparison with the Druids would be the council memorizer, who memorized resolutions of previous councils. The point in all this, in case you're wondering, is that collective identity based on accident of birth must of necessity suppress division within the group. Pre-class societies handle irreconcilable differences through the process of fission; class societies handle them through conscious suppression of emotion. Collective identity based on free and open decision making, can only evolve under conditions of socialism. Community spirit is a motherhood and apple pie issue; and, as with patriotism, it hides a multitude of sins. JC