"The collision of two disparate levels of historical development"

Genocide against the Indians: materialism vs. moralizing


BY SAM MANUEL
In a letter printed on the facing page, Steve Halpern thanks the Militant for printing excerpts from the pamphlet Genocide Against the Indians by George Novack in the January 12 Militant. But Halpern’s letter, taken as a whole, sharply disagrees with Novack’s materialist approach to history and the development of society.

In his April 1970 introduction, Novack points out that his aim is not so much to tell what happened in the conquest of native peoples—many historians have done so—but why. “I have used the Marxist method of historical materialism to answer this key question,” he says. “What was involved was the collision of two disparate levels of historical development, two fundamentally different socioeconomic formations, two irreconcilable modes of life, types of cultures and outlooks upon the world. The defeat of the native tribes was predetermined by the incomparably greater powers of production and destruction, numbers, wealth, and organization, on the side of the classes composing bourgeois civilization.”

Commenting on Novack’s pamphlet (which is also included as chapter one in America’s Revolutionary Heritage by Novack), Halpern writes that “many of its conclusions continue to be true” and that “some things have changed.” But he fails to indicate which conclusions he thinks are no longer true and what has changed.

Halpern hints that these changes may be found in two books he recommends, which supposedly “give a clear documentation” of the genocide against the Native Americans and “expose the foundations of how property was acquired in this country.” Both describe in extensive detail the brutal conquest of the original inhabitants of the Americas. But these authors, like other bourgeois historians, are incapable of giving a scientific, class explanation of those events. Instead, they offer a liberal, idealist view.

For example, American Holocaust by David Stannard compares the massacres against Native Americans from the 15th through the 19th centuries with the imperialist government of Germany’s extermination campaign against the Jews under the Nazi regime in the 20th century—two completely different historical periods involving different class forces, causes, and results. Stannard argues that the cause of both phenomena lies in “the core of European thought and culture—Christianity.” This approach is similar to that of anarchist political commentator Noam Chomsky, who in his book Year 501: The Conquest Continues, rattles off an undifferentiated litany of horrors perpetrated by the ruling classes from the arrival of European settlers in the 1490s to the U.S.-led imperialist Gulf War in 1990-91, and even compares Christopher Columbus to Adolf Hitler. This is an ahistorical approach, to say the least. It does not even distinguish between the period when capitalism was revolutionary, and the epoch of imperialism, beginning in the 1890s, when capitalism reached its current stage—imperialism—and became a reactionary brake on progress.

Similarly, Halpern, in trying to highlight the accomplishments of Native Americans, seems to have a hard time explaining them accurately and historically. He marvels at the fact that in North America there were 500 Native American “nations” with “distinct cultures,” and that “much of the food we eat was developed by Native American farming techniques.” Novack lists many of these foods, and their numbers are impressive. But what Novack explains—and is missing in most other accounts—is the historical stages in which these developments took place. The indigenous inhabitants of this continent were in the early phases of developing agriculture, based on collective ownership of the land in a classless, stateless, egalitarian society in which women played the leading role. They produced only for subsistence. That society, representing the stage of primitive communism, collided with the qualitatively more developed productive capacities of capitalism, including farming techniques.

Halpern gets to the heart of his disagreement with Novack when he says that “the overall course of history is progressive” but then adds that “it is difficult to see the gains” for Native Americans. He even lends credence to the idea that “Native Americans might have had better lives before Columbus than they do today.” (Without citing a source, he attributes this view to Fidel Castro to give it authority). This approach substitutes moralizing for a materialist analysis.

The development of capitalist social relations worldwide in the 18th and 19th centuries was historically progressive. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained this in the Communist Manifesto, written in 1847-48. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years,” they wrote, “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” In the United States this led to two deep-going popular revolutions—one gained independence from British colonial rule and the second smashed slavery in the South.

The working class takes no responsibility for the barbaric methods of the capitalist class—including the genocide against the Indians—which working people will sweep away along with the system of capitalist rule itself when they take political power and transform society in the interests of the vast majority. Marx and Engels also explain that what the bourgeoisie “produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers”—the working class. In their fight for self-determination today, Native Americans, along with Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, will stand with workers and farmers in the front ranks of capitalism’s gravediggers.

***

U.S. capitalism arose
upon conquest of Indians


Printed below is an excerpt from Genocide against the Indians—Its Role in the Rise of U.S. Capitalism by George Novack. The pamphlet is one of Pathfinder's Books of the Month for April. The conflict between the European settlers and the Indians was a social struggle between two incompatible systems of production, forms of property, and ways of life, explains Novack. The piece quoted is from the chapter "The Indians and the struggle for possession of the land." Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY GEORGE NOVACK
In their catalogue of crimes against humanity, the spokesmen for capitalism include the expropriation of property without “just compensation,” the use of violence to overturn established regimes, and the resort to extralegal measures. They add, as the crime of crimes, the extermination of entire populations, for which the term “genocide” has recently been coined. These self-professed humanitarians ascribe such aims above all to “Marxist” and “Communist” devils. In contrast they hold up the angelic respect for property rights, love of peace, regard for law and order, preference for gradual change by democratic consent, and other virtues presumably inculcated by American “free enterprise.”

This is a handy set of principles to justify the capitalist regime while defaming its opponents. But all these principles have little application to the conduct of the bourgeoisie in American history. They have been honored, if at all, more in the breach than in the observance.

Historians fired by zeal to indict the opponents of capitalism for these offenses should first direct their attention to the ancestors of contemporary American capitalism. No class in American history invaded the property rights of others more ruthlessly, employed violence so readily, and benefited so extensively by revolutionary actions as has the American bourgeoisie on its road to power.

The precursors of the monopolists acquired their property by expropriating the Indians, the British crown along with its Loyalist lackeys, and the slaveholders, not to mention their continued stripping of the small farmers and self-employed workers. They effected these dispossessions of other people’s property not simply by peaceful, legal, or democratic means, but in extremely violent, high-handed, and militaristic ways. Wherever they could not get what they went after by bargaining or money, they took by main force or direct action.

The conquest of the Indians, as we have seen, takes its place in this series of events as the earliest and crassest case of the rapacity, ferocity, and duplicity with which the bourgeois forces smashed the impediments on the way to their objectives. They themselves committed the supreme crime they falsely attribute to the aims of revolutionary socialists. The extermination of the Indian was the outstanding example of “genocide” in modern American history—and it was the first rung in the ladder by which the bourgeoisie climbed to the top.

The transmission of the continent into their hands was not accomplished by peaceful agreements. It is common knowledge that virtually every treaty made with the Indians for over four hundred years was broken by the architects of the American nation. By brute force, by the most perfidious deeds, by wars of extermination, they settled the question of who was to own and occupy the continent and to rule it. The treatment of the Indians exemplifies to what lengths the owners of private property can—and will—go in promoting their material interests.

The methods by which the white invaders disposed of the Indian problem had far-reaching results. Ancient Indian society was shattered and eradicated and powerful masters placed over them and over North America. The main social substance of that sweeping change consisted in the conversion and division of tribal property in land, owned in common and cooperatively used, into private property. This continent passed from the loose network of tribal communities into the hands of kings, landed proprietors, planters, merchants, capitalists, small farmers, and town dwellers who directed and composed the new society.

The conflict between the red man and the white is usually represented as essentially racial in character. It is true that their mutual antagonism manifested itself and was carried on by both sides under the guise of racial hatred. But their war to the death was at bottom a social struggle, a battle for supremacy between two incompatible systems of production, forms of property, and ways of life. Like all profound social struggles the scramble for the sources and acquisition of wealth was at its root. In this case, the chief prize was individual ownership and “free” disposition of the land and its products.

These material stakes account for the obdurateness of the conflict which persisted through four centuries and for the implacable hostility displayed by white settlers of all nationalities toward the Indians of all tribes. This was also responsible in the last analysis for the impossibility of any harmony or enduring compromise between the two. One or the other had to yield and go under.

That is how the materialist school of Marxism interprets the cruel treatment accorded the Indians and the reasons for their downfall. If this explanation is accepted, prevailing views of early American history must be discarded. Schoolchildren, and not they alone, are taught nowadays that the first great social change in this country came from the Patriots’ fight for independence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In the light of the foregoing analysis, this long-standing misconception has to be rejected.

The colonial uprising, for all its importance, was neither the first social transformation in America, nor can it be considered the most fundamental one. It was preceded, interwoven, and followed by the white invasion and penetration which overthrew the Indian tribal network. This process of struggle, undertaken to install the rule of private property and its corresponding institutions in place of communal property and its specific institutions, was an even more radical social upheaval than the contest between the colonists and the mother country.