Between the Lines: State Murder, USA (1992)

The Between the Lines Column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

State Murder, USA

In sixteenth-century Geneva a deranged character by the name of Jacques Chapellaz confessed to cursing God and trying to eat the devil, though finding it hard to swallow his horns. The poor man was condemned to having his tongue cut out. That was then: dark, ignorant, religiously confused times. Panorama (BBC1, 9.30 pm, 3 August) was about how the USA claims to be a rational society which has surpassed the excesses of Old Testament morality. The programme showed how false is such a claim. In the cells of Death Row in Huntsville, Texas there are 358 men who have been sentenced to be murdered by the state. That is just one of the waiting rooms for death in the 50 states of the USA. Amongst those awaiting the legalised murder which “justice" has condemned them to are several who are clearly so mentally deranged as to have little control over their actions. For example, one condemned prisoner was interviewed who was described by a psychologist as having a mental age of ten and as compulsively agreeing with whatever is asked of him in order to please people. Obtaining a confession of murder from such a pathetic person was hardly difficult.

A new and highly conspicuous pressure group is called VOCAL: Victims of Crime and Leniency, comprising people who want courts to sentence more "wrongdoers" to death. Many of these advocates of callous vengeance were themselves bereaved as a result of murder. They have become bitter and irrational. But now they have won the right for victims' families to testify in courts in order to explain to juries how only an eye for an eye will satisfy them. The unreasonableness of expecting just responses to emanate from angry, vengeful relatives of those who have been murdered is obvious; their inclusion into the US “justice" system is proof that the objective of criminal punishment is largely revenge.

The reverse side of this thirst for revenge in the form of dead bodies, which turns “justice" into organised murder to show the murderers the validity of violence as the highest ethic, is fear. The reason for disgusting pressure groups like VOCAL, made up of wretched, hurt workers, is that they live in a society where almost everyone is scared. The victims are afraid, and their relatives are afraid that the criminals will be punished too little, and the criminals are made afraid by the threat of state murder. What way of running a society is such mutual fear? How dare the US leaders preach of new world orders and civilised values and human rights. In a socialist society, where anti-social behaviour will no longer be stimulated by the relationships of property, we shall not seek to solve problems (and problems there surely will be) by threats, either of confinement or murder.

The members of of VOCAL shown on Panorama would do well to read William Morris's News From Nowhere wherein Old Hammond, speaking from the vantage of a moneyless, propertyless, stateless socialist society, explains how the response to anti-social acts has changed:

'The punishment of which men used to talk wisely and act so foolishly, what was it hut the expression of their fear, since they - i.e. the rulers of society - were dwelling like an armed band in a hostile country. But we who live amongst our friends need neither fear nor punish. Surely if we, in dread of an occasional rare homicide, an occasional rough blow, were solemnly and legally to commit homicide and violence, we would only be a society of ferocious cowards."

In the USA today 80 per cent of people polled favour state murder; a decade ago less than half did. More fear, more cowardly revenge and more prisoners condemned to lives waiting for execution. Surely there is a wiser course for humanity.

Who is the savage?

Early Travellers in North America (BBC2, 9.10pm, 6 August) presented a series of accounts from nineteenth-century travellers who encountered the North American Indians. European orthodoxy at the time was that these people were savages, racially sub-human. In fact, visitors such as Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope and Robert Louis Stevenson were impressed by the dignity of the co-operative native Americans and horrified by the way in which they were cast into prison-like reservations and often killed. Coming only a few days after the Panorama documentary two points emerged forcefully: Firstly, there were no eases of native American Indian Death Rows; secondly, how many of the current "justice" officials owe their power to those before them whose prestige and wealth was obtained by organising the violent attacks upon and killings of defenceless Indians? If justice was about revenge - and both are terms from the vocabulary of capitalism - might not some of the great capitalist families of the Land of the Free be rotting in death cells instead of hopeless wage slaves, many of whom will be killed for crimes that they did not even commit but lack the money or the wit to prove their innocence?

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Origin of the idea of justice (1965)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Locke, who, like the philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, used the deductive method employed in geometry, came to think that private property engendered the idea of justice. In his “Human Understanding” he expressly says that “Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name injustice is given being the invasion or violation of that right . . .”

If the idea of Justice, as Locke thought, can only appear after and as a consequence of private property, the idea of theft, or rather the tendency to take unthinkingly what one needs or desires, is on the contrary, well developed, before the institution of private property. The communistic savage and barbarian behave in regard to material goods as our savants and writers do in regard to intellectual goods: whenever they find them they take them, to use Molière’s expression. But this natural custom becomes theft, crime, from the time when common property is replaced by private property.

Into the head and heart of savages and barbarians common property put ideas and sentiments which bourgeois Christians, those sad results of private property, will find very strange.

Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary who in the 18th century lived fifteen years among North American savages, not yet corrupted by Christianity and bourgeois civilisation, said:

“The Indians believe that the Great Spirit created the world and all that it contains for the common good of men; when he stocked the earth and filled the woods with game, it was not for the advantage of some, but of all. Everything is given in common to the children of men. Everything that breathes on the earth, everything that grows in the fields, everything that lives in the rivers and waters, belongs jointly to all, and everyone has a right to his share."

[From a lecture by Paul Lafargue on Idealism and Materialism, Socialist Standard, May 1915.]

Pioneers, Oh Pioneers! (1932)

From the November 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Observer for June 26th gives an extract from their paper of a hundred years ago, which contains the following: —

“The expedition sent out by the American Government in 1820-21 to explore the Rocky Mountains has at length been heard of after an absence of eleven years.

While west of the mountains they fell in with a tribe called the Copper Indians, who receive their name from owning extensive copper mines ; 300 of them, armed with bows and copper darts, attacked the company in day time; a severe action ensued, and only about 30 of the Indians escaped ; the rest were killed or wounded, with a loss of two killed of the company.” (Italics ours.)

The Onward March of Capitalism. (1927)

From the June 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

To show the degrading effect of capitalist production on the modern wage-worker, Paul Lafargue uses this comparison.

“Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.” —The Right to be Lazy (p. 10).

To justify this statement, we need only compare the general conditions of the workers to-day with the following description that Lewis Morgan gives of the American Indian :—

“All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organised. A structure composed of such units would of necessity bear the impress of their character, for as the unit so the compound. It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character.” (Ancient Society, pp. 85-6.)

Such was the state of man in this form of society, before modern civilisation played its part. And the curse it has been to these people is evident from the following item of news that appeared in the “Daily News,” 7/3/1927 :—

“The Red Indians, confined to reservations in various parts of the United States, even as near the east coast as New York State itself, are dying by thousands, abused and neglected.

Mr. Robert E. Callahan, a writer on western life, has just spent a year surveying the 22 principal Indian reservations. He declared that on some reservations he found the Indians killing their pet dogs and their horses to keep themselves alive”

And further, we are told that :—

“Judges appointed by the agents have been known to throw Indians into gaol for resenting an agent’s treatment of them. An Indian named Kill Thunder was chained by one of these men, who was judge, gaoler, and prosecutor all in one, for visiting a friend without the agent’s permission.

There are estimated to be 340,000 Indians left in America. Mr. Callahan says 225,000 of them have been reduced to the most miserable conditions of existence, and that unless some drastic changes are made the Red Indians within a few years will be extinct.”

So we see that the capitalist method of wiping out, what is to them, an odious comparison, between the Barbarian and the wage-slave, is to reduce the former to a state of poverty and subjection, parallel to that suffered by the latter.

Exploitation by the capitalist class, together with the evils that flow from it, spreads like a plague, and to escape from its vile influence is out of the question.

In drawing up the manifesto of the Communist Party (1847) Marx and Engels dealt with this point :

On page 10, they say :—

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. ”

And further, on the same page, we read :

“It compels all nations on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeoisie mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

Events since this was written have demonstrated the truth of the assertions made. The most recent example, on the one hand, is China, whose development has been accelerated through its exploitation by the Western Powers. And an effort is now being made by the property-owning class in China, to rid itself of that influence, and secure the full benefits from the exploitation of the workers of that country.

On the other hand, there is the American Indians, who, not having reached the preceding stage in historical development to capitalist society, is unable to adopt that form of production, and consequently must suffer the penalty of extinction.

A nation or class can only establish that form of society which has been made possible by conditions which have developed within the prevailing system. And the chief factor which determines the character of a society; and the direction or form which the new system will take, is the way in which the wealth of that society is produced, and the form of ownership or distribution.

The introduction of capitalism, necessitated, not only that the production of goods for sale should be developed, together with the merchant and his capital, but also the presence of a body of producers that could be profitably utilised as wage-workers.

The backward nature of the vast populations of Russia and China, accounts to a great extent for the slow development of these countries. And the fact that they are, in spite of this handicap, following in the direction of the more advanced countries, speaks volumes for the penetrating powers of the capitalist method of production. But had the social system of these countries been in a more primitive state, their fate would have been that of America and the Colonies, which were developed by the modern emigrant wage-worker. And the original inhabitants, who were not slaughtered by the invading force, pushed in the background, and used later as chattel slaves or exterminated in compounds, provided by the “benevolent” Christian capitalists, because they could not profitably use them in the modern method of production.

As the establishment of capitalism was made possible by conditions that developer in feudalism, so in turn have the conditions been developed in the present system that makes the next social change both possible and necessary.

The growth of social production within the present system, supplies the foundation of the society that is to take its place, and makes the change to Socialism possible. The private ownership by a non-producing section of the socially produced wealth implies on the other hand a propertyless producing class, whose interest dictates the need for that change; a change that awaits the understanding by this class; that to secure the benefits their social productive powers justify, they must end the private ownership in the means of life, and establish a system of society in which the wealth that is socially produced, shall be socially owned.

And by taking advantage of the political conditions that have grown up with the system, they will secure control of the machinery of state, and with command of this force, accomplish the social change which their class interest dictates.

Ted Lake

The Wild West. The Myth and the Reality. (1956)

From the June 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this rapidly changing world, the form of entertainment indulged in by the majority of the population in the industrialized countries has undergone many changes in the last 50 years. Not only have the forms of dancing, popular music, films and literature changed, but the fictional character also.

There is, however, one familiar figure who has been our constant companion on the screen and bookstall during all these years. In silent “flicks,” talkies, colour, Three-D, Cinemascope, he still remains the same—long, lean and suntanned; with Stetson hat and pistols, his mount well-groomed—our old and ever- popular friend, the Cowboy.

Popular Appeal

To the densely-herded urban masses whose wide-open spaces are confined at best to a small suburban garden (or for the less fortunate, a cactus in a flower-pot), the unrestricted country of the American West has a vast appeal.

It is probably the fictional Westerner’s apparent freedom that is the real attraction. Our celluloid and paper-pulp hero spends his time destroying the forces of evil, be they represented as Indians, rustlers or land-grabbers. He is gallant with the ladies, and never fails to defend or restore legally-owned property. Sometimes he is on the wrong side of the law, forced into this position by some ruthless landowner, or a victim of the financiers' guile. In spite of these lawless trends, however, our hero's basic goodness still shines through. Faced with this dilemma m their hero, the film producers' usual way out is to get him conveniently killed.

Modern man is generally tied down to one job, often tedious and uninteresting. The Westerner is aloof from this. He never seems to be very closely tied to any full-time occupation, even when he dons the uniform of the U.S. Cavalry. To imagine oneself able to undertake any adventure, or punish any infamy, is a wonderful escape from punching the time-clock.

The Western film or story has generally a twofold approach. One shows a desire for justice and for the removal of tyranny. The other depicts violence and. quick action as opposed to thought and reasoned movement. The stories are seldom complicated. The viewer or reader does not have to rack his brain over subtle psychological mysteries or unpleasant social problems. The stories are easy to write and the films cheap to produce. They are ideal products for a mass market.

A Glimpse into the Past

At this point, let us look at the birthplace of these modem legends, and roll back the years.

The term "West" in American history covered each stage of the frontier as it moved towards the Pacific from the early Atlantic seaboard settlements. We take up the story when that frontier had reached the Mississippi River.

It was the Spaniards who first moved up into what are now Texas, New Mexico and California, and explored the Mississippi. They built churches, mission stations and settlements. At the same time the French were moving along the Great Lakes and the rivers from Canada and extending over the plains to the Rockies. A few were priests, but the majority were fur-trappers and traders. These latter mixed freely with the wandering Indian tribes.

The English were the next settlers, consolidating and developing as they went. In time they came to represent a new rising Capitalist class, viewing the New World as something more than just a possession of an overseas absolute monarch.

Francis Parkman who, in 1846, journeyed from Kansas over the Oregon Trail to the foot of the Rockies, mixed with the Indians and noted their habits. In his journal he writes at length about the French trappers and trail-blazers and their inter-marriage with the Indians. He noted something else that was to have a more important effect on history—the settlers' wagons heading for Oregon and California, Mormons striking out into the wilderness to found a new home in Utah, the adventurous seeking the new-found gold. America was in the process of making another frontier.

Expansion

The United States, having purchased Louisiana and secured Florida, was still faced with a foreign power in the south-west. In 1821 Mexico had become independent of Spain, and the lands over the Rio Grande passed to her. Land could be purchased in Texas for 12½ cents per acre, or one-tenth of the price that the U.S. Government charged for land. Within a few years about 20,000 Americans, mostly southerners, moved into Texas. A smaller number travelling by sea had secured land in California.

Mexico had officially abolished slavery, but the newcomers, fresh from the slave-owning south, had no wish to become peasants. Hired labour was rare, so Mexico looked the other way. The rapid changes of Mexican government made the Texans uncertain of the status of their slave property. In 1835, Santa Anna abrogated certain states' rights (this included Texas) and these economic and political struggles led to the Texans' declaring a provisional government. Some 200 of them were besieged and slaughtered in the fortified mission-station of the Alamo, but the siege gave time for the Texans under Houston to form an army and get support from the U.S. Houston avenged the Alamo by capturing Santa Anna and destroying the Mexican Army.

The final result was that the lands north of the Rio Grande were annexed. Five new states were formed in the Union, and all except California were declared slave states. They were, however, too lightly populated and unsuited for one-main-crop agriculture to be affected by that form of property. The growing industrial north did feel, however, that the Mexican War had given more power to the slave-owning south.

The Self-made Man

The rapid expansion of America in the west brought great personal opportunities. A land that had no old-established ruling class flung up its new Capitalists and developers from among those of humble birth. Individualism or, better still, individual property rights became the order of the day.

The man, who through luck and resource, amassed money was a being to be looked up to. Not being tied down with the ideas of aristocracy, making money and not how it was made, was the new Capitalist ethic. The Press slated those who returned from the West to a somewhat less lucrative but probably more secure life in the East Failure was against the nation and the destiny of America.

In the new areas the State machine was weak, and weakened further by the great regard for property. Nothing must stand in the way of the “go-getter." There was little restraining influence on wealth or the way it was secured. Laws tended to be flouted openly when they stood in the way of personal advance.

The Gold Rash

In 1848 gold was discovered in California, and before long the country was over-run with prospectors. Whereas in other areas the settlers followed hunters and turned the land under the plough and spade, in California the principal attraction was gold. Mostly the newcomers came by ship, round Cape Horn, or broke the journey by the short overland route through Panama, but some crossed the continent by waggon, a long and most dangerous journey. Wandering Indians and the hot, arid desert valleys were but two of the problems to be faced. The waggon train scout, Wm. Manley, reported graphically of these emigrants' torments.

San Francisco became the centre of the Barbary Coast and, as was to be expected in a gold-rush community, catered for every vice. At this time in the settlement only two per cent. of the population were women, and to meet the shortage boatloads of ladies of uncertain virtue were sent out from the eastern states and from Europe. The reader can get some idea of the turbulence when he considers that from 1848 to 1856 there were some 1,200 murders and only three official hangings In the San Francisco area, especially as the population only numbered some 20,000. California, not deriving its wealth from the slaves or the soil, developed what was in fact a new financial and Capitalist outlook.

Pike's Peak and Oscar Wilde

Another gold rush started in 1858, when gold was discovered in the Pike's Peak area of Colorado. The same stream of wagons, with some prospectors even pushing their belongings on handcarts, creaked across the plains. It was in this area that Horace Tabor, “the Bonanza King," arose; living in splendour, he even built an opera-house in Leadville. To this flamboyant and noisy setting came, on a brief visit, the prince of aesthetes, Oscar Wilde, who declared the miners to be "Capital fellows, and not at all rough."

One settlement that stands out from all the rest was the Mormon headquarters at Salt Lake City. They built a city in the wilderness after many hardships, a town that in many ways was an example to others springing up at this time. They showed how a group of people with a strong communal sense could accomplish a more stable way of living than the purely individualistic elements.

The War

When the Civil War broke out, the Confederate South counted on support from the Mid-west, principally on the point that these areas had always used the Mississippi as an outlet and the Confederates controlled the sea outlet of New Orleans. The Confederates overlooked the railways : the West could now link up directly with the industrial eastern states, and so the economic grip of “Old Muddy" was broken.

The Pacific States being so far from Washington, there was always the threat of secession from the Union. Representatives from these states had to make a long sea voyage round America; only the hardy and the poor attempted the covered wagon overland route. The North, aware of these problems, speeded up the railway programme. In 1869 the two lines met at Ogden, Utah. The gap was filling in, the wilderness was being conquered.

The Mid-west prospered because of the War, and by the fact that England and the rest of Europe had bad harvests in the 1860s. Industrialization was creating a new market to be satisfied, and exports of foodstuffs increased.

The Coming of the Cowboy

In the vast central area called the Great Plains, settlements were few and far between. Towns sprang up round the mining camps, and it was these places that dominated the scene. The Plains were not considered to be of much use other than for Indians and hunting. They were areas that wagons passed through, but not to settle; the gold and the sunny fertile valleys of the Pacific were the main attraction. Here, on these plains and deserts, was America's last frontier.

Texas and the south-west had always been a cattle-raising country, at least near the Rio Grande, way back in Spanish times. It was in these lands that the Vaquero or Cowboy lived and learned his trade. The Cowpuncher was a man who worked in the railway stockyards as a grader and loader, and later the name was applied to all ranch workers.

As a result of Texas joining the Confederates in the Civil War. she was cut off from the sea and the Mississippi by the Union forces. A surplus of cattle resulted, as there was no market available. Faced with ruin after the war. like so many other cattle-men Joseph McCoy conceived the idea of driving the sellable surplus cattle along the Chisholm trail to Abilene, thence by rail to Kansas and the eastern states. The cattle could live on the herbage that fed bison; it was just a question of linking-up with water courses and holes. This was the commencement of the great cattle-drives that still figure so much in the cinema and magazines.

The increased industrialization of America and Europe led to a need for more and more meat. Profits went up, and it became the age of the cattle kings and the cowboy, owners of great herds like Chisum and Kennedy. This period of the fictional saga was not very long in fact, yet it has provided thrills and entertainment for millions since that time.

By 1871 some 600,000 head of cattle were driven to various points north from Texas, and the idea caught on. Cattle-raising and driving spread right up to Montana.

The cattle kings, like the miners, brought wealth to many small towns, but like them it was sometimes transient; The ranch-workers, miners and settlers who worked hard and were often isolated for long periods tended to get together whenever possible. If they were in a religious mood, then large camp meetings were held, at which fervour and emotions ran riot. At the other extreme, the saloon played quite a part in the growing towns. People who were often without the means to create or study tended to "bust loose" in town. These saloons provided drink and refreshment, women, gamblers, bullies and thugs, and the social get-together.

It is in this cattle age that we find the now almost legendary figures of the West. The sheriffs and bad men, like the Earp Brothers, “Bat” Masterton, Sam Brown, Plummer and Frank Loving, not forgetting the old favourites Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill. Some of these characters would have been better confined to the pathological ward.

The end of the frontier was near, however. At Abilene, T. C. Henry sowed "winter wheat" and it was a success. The plains could now be turned under the plough, and settlers moved in in great numbers. From this arose the struggle between the ranchers and settlers, the battle between the unfenced range and the boundary wire. By the 1880-90s. improved agriculture and grasslands, as well as improved stock and irrigation, won the day. The ever-spreading railways killed the "big drive" and the “Lead Steer." The vast open range was out; it was no longer good business to wander for days looking for grass and water. Output could be increased in a smaller space. The mines also were being grouped into large concerns, and the prospector became a mine-worker. 

The Redskin

It is as well we take a brief glimpse at the original occupant of this land, the Indian. Small in numbers, therefore of no great use to the slave-owner or the farmer and industrialist, he was generally regarded as a form of dangerous vermin. Whatever the Abolitionist may have said about the evils of slavery, or what tears he may have wept over the Negro, he certainly never extended these sentiments to the Indian.

The Redskins' main source of food was the bison, herds of which often covered the plains for miles. The settlers, the railways, sportsmen and Government policy soon reduced the bison to a few thousands. The Government thought this would keep the Indians tied to their reserves, make them devote more of their time to agriculture, and cease their wanderings and tribal warfare. Unfortunately for the Indians, the reserves got smaller and the game for food less and less. People with a Stone Age culture, they found it hard to grasp what was happening. At one time a number of them, so disturbed by the numbers of trains and wagons passing over their land, pathetically tried to go east because they thought everyone had left there. 

Attacks on Indian camps by soldiers were by no means unusual. This is a point that the film moguls generally omit from the typical “western.” In 1876, for example, a Colonel Reynolds attacked a Sioux camp at Powder River and burnt it out, the temperature at the time being 40 degrees below zero. The Indian braves counter-attacked and drove the soldiers away. These incidents caused a great meeting of the Sioux tribe, Cheyennes and Arapahoes on the Little Big Horn, under Sitting Bull and Two Moon. It was this gathering that defeated General Custer, an incident that the ardent Western fan must have seen portrayed many times. Indian risings occurred all the way down to Mexico. Like the Mau-Mau of our own time, the Indian terrorists’ tactics did not tend to improve their position or gain them much sympathy.

The Apache War of 1883-85 is the one in which the famous Geronimo took part. With 35 men and over 100 women and children he engaged 50,000 U.S. troops, 500 Indian scouts and a hostile armed populace as well as the soldiers of Mexico for about 18 months before surrendering.

The last violent uprising came rather late. A prophetic dream and ritual dance having its origin in a Nevada reserve soon spread among the Indians. Some 350 Sioux deserted their Dakota reserve. U.S. cavalry intercepted them and under Hotchkiss guns as protection started to disarm them. A chief began the ritual ghost dance and donned his war-bonnet. The immediate fighting resulted in the deaths of some 200 Indians and 60 soldiers. Thus ended once and for all any attempt by the Indians to get their problems solved by violence. Properly-defined reserves and infiltration into the mass of the population with their many trades and occupations soon left the Indians as living museum-pieces.

The development of America, like the advance of industrialization in Africa and Asia, is one of the principal aspects of Capitalist society. The old tribal organizations are broken up by the unstemmed tide of investment for profit. Capitalism, now more or less universal, likes to look back on some aspect of its earlier days. From the American viewpoint, the glorification of the early West does just this.

One point the magazine and film producers seldom show is that a large land mass was brought under cultivation and development in a fairly short space of time by people who, generally, were far removed from the much boosted and vaunted violence so usual a feature of their films and stories.

Jack Law

Surviving (2009)

Book Review from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Selling Your Father’s Bones by Brian Schofield, Harper Press, 2008

This is a fascinating account of the fate of Nez Perce (rhymes with Fez Purse) people of the north west of the USA and their land. It uses the narrative of the desperate 1877 flight from their old homeland in the Wallowa valley towards exile in Canada, as a means to describe the exploitation and near destruction of the West through a particularly rapacious form of capitalism. The industrial pollution (the mile wide purple pit of Butte, Montana, is very memorable) and destructive agriculture are vividly depicted. As a history of a “Native American” group, it is especially useful as it brings the subject right up to date – an annoying feature of books of this nature is the close of the narrative at the loss of political independence, usually deep in the nineteenth century. The contrast between the desolation left after the death of the settler’s dream (the scary empty landscapes of No Country for Old Men) and the relative success of the communitarian Nez Perce rewards the reader with vicarious pleasures and hints towards the very real benefits, both economic and social, which socialism will bring.

Kaz.

Quote: John Lame Deer (2020)

 From the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.’

John Lame Deer, Lakota Sioux protester and satirist (1903 – 76)

Lewis Henry Morgan. An Account and Appreciation of his Life Work. (1919)

From the October 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

The Discovery of the Gens.
The second part of "Ancient Society" contains the fruits of those researches of Morgan's which it is generally recognised constitute his greatest contribution to sociology. Prior to its appearance there existed little or no exact knowledge of the tribal organisations of primitive peoples.

In his "League of the Iroquois" and even later works, Morgan himself had adhered to the commonly accepted view that the Mohawks, Senecas, etc., were each nations in many ways equivalent to modern national communities. The smaller groups within these "nations," each of which was called after a certain animal which was its totem, Morgan had designated "tribes." Subsequent investigation, however, convinced him that the larger groups, the Senecas, etc., were the true tribes, and that they were different from the nation which only came into existence after the coalescence of several such tribes, and fundamentally so from the modern territorial nation, in which kinship as a social tie is eliminated.

But the most important fact was that the basic and unitary organisation of the Indians was the smaller group, that which he had earlier called the "tribe." This "clan" or "totem group" he soon recognised, as his researches expanded, to be an all but universal institution among savage and barbarian peoples. Everywhere it consisted of a group of blood relatives descended, or claiming descent, from a common ancestor. Its members were strictly bound not to intermarry, but to mate outside the group ; they elected and deposed their own chiefs, and met together in common council.

Then Morgan made a remarkable discovery. Even the most learned and acute historians up to his time had been greatly puzzled over an institution which existed among the ancient Greeks and was known to the classical Latin writers by the name of "Gens." Being unable to understand its structure or function, Grote and other historians erroneously considered the gens to be an extension and outgrowth, of the monogamous family. Morgan, however, showed convincingly in his "Ancient Society'' that the Greek and Roman gens is identical in all essentials with the Indian "totem group," the only important difference between them being that among the Indians, except where European influence had crept in, the common ancestor of the group was a woman, female descent prevailed and children always remained in the same totem group as their mother, whereas among the early Greeks and Romans the recognised ancestor was a male, paternal descent was the rule, and children belonged to the gens of their father.

Morgan considered the former an archaic or primitive, and the latter the derived and modified, form of the same organisation, which he decided out of consistency to henceforth refer to by its Latin name of "gens." He believed that the change from the maternal to the paternal gens was an outcome of the growth of private property, possession of which instilled into the fathers a desire that this wealth should be enjoyed, after the death of themselves, by their own children.

Under the law of the gens the property of a member had to remain within the group, and as the maternal system placed a man's children in their mother's gens, never in his own, they were disinherited as regards their father's property. By introducing male descent and thus keeping children in their father’s gens they were enabled to inherit his property. Morgan clinched his argument by showing this change to have actually taken place in recent years with the growth of private property among several Indian tribes as a result of foreign influences.

Having thus placed ancient history upon a sound basis Morgan endeavours to show the stages by which, in Greece and in Rome, the social organisation of the gens and the tribe passed away and was supplanted by a form of society based upon possession of property and territorial residence. In a series of brilliant chapters he shows how increasing population, intermixture of tribes, growing division of social functions, and above all, the increase in private property and its concentration into the hands of a few, all results of the "enlargement of the sources of subsistence," gradually undermined the institutions founded on kinship and prepared the way for and made necessary the rise of the political State.

Morgan's analysis still holds good, but it may be usefully supplemented by Engels' "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," which shows that class-oppression is the function of the State-power. Morgan did not deal with the feudal form of political society which developed from gentile society in a somewhat different fashion, but Engels outlined its beginning among the Germans and it has been adequately if briefly treated in a generalised manner by Edward Jenks in his "Short History of Politics."

One of the most instructive and important chapters in "Ancient Society" treats of the native culture of Mexico prior to the Spanish Conquest. Investigation had convinced Morgan that the records of the Spaniards, together with the historic works which, like Prescott's, were built upon them, were very unreliable wherever they dealt with the social institutions of either the Aztecs or the Incas of Peru. The Spaniards, accustomed only to the social relations of a feudal monarchy, completely misunderstood what little they did observe of Mexican and Peruvian society. They interpreted the league of tribes as an empire and the war-chief of the Aztec federation as an Emperor.

Morgan did valuable pioneer work in unravelling the mystery of "Aztec civilisation," and had already criticised the prevailing misconceptions in some of the articles we have referred to. Moreover, in this field he had the assistance of his friend, Adolph H. Bandelier (1840-1914) a Swiss who had gone to America, and the leading authority at that time on the archeology of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico

In "Ancient Society" Morgan's conclusions were fully stated and the evidence massed which showed that the Aztecs were, at the time of their discovery by Europeans, in the Middle Status of Barbarism, intermediate between the Iroquois and the Greeks of the Homeric period, and that they lived in village communities based upon the gens.

By revealing the inner structure of tribal society Morgan performed a signal service to sociology. Incidentally he showed and was one of the first to appreciate the fact, now generally recognised, that the barbarian is not a bloodthirsty monster of ferocity, and that his society, far from being a despotism ruled over by a brutal, tyrannical chieftain, is usually a well-organised, democratic body.

  "All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachems and chiefs claiming no superiority ; and they were a brotherhood bound together by ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens." ("Ancient Society", p. 85.)

The Family and Property.
In the third part of "Ancient Society," which describes the evolution of the family, Morgan not only re-stated his theory (which we have already outlined) in a revised, more complete, and widely generalised form, but he devoted a special section to a refutation of the criticisms of McLennan, the author of "Primitive Marriage." He was now in a position to show that McLennan's position was, in the light of the fresh discoveries, completely untenable, his theory of tribal Endogamy and Exogamy being due to the common confusion of the gens with the tribe.

Morgan's theory of the family is generally accepted to-day in its main outlines. His most important error lay in considering the patriarchal family to be an exceptional form instead of, as has been since shown by the Russian student, Maxim Kovalevsky, and others, to be a widespread institution characteristic of the Middle and Upper stages of Barbarism, and as the intermediary almost everywhere manifest between the matriarchal family and monogamy.

In his concluding part Morgan outlines his view of the development of property. He shows how, feebly developed and largely communal during Savagery, it achieves more definite recognition and power during the pastoral stage in the period of Barbarism and reaches almost complete dominance in social life with the greatly increased productivity of the epoch of Civilisation.

He defines three successive systems of property inheritance, the first two of which correspond with the two stages of female and male descent in the gens among the members of which the property of a deceased member was divided ; the third system harmonising with the monogamous family in which the father's property is inherited exclusively by his own family.

Morgan's observations on the social significance of private property are very acute and approximate very closely to the Marxian position. He says:

  "It is impossible to overestimate the influence of property in the civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and laws are institute with primary reference to its creation, protection, and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production ; and after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making machine." (Pp. 511-512.)

"The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over  property . . . The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilisation began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence ; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim ; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction." (P. 561.)

Final Work.
With the publication of his principal literary work, the real culmination of his long enquiry into the evolution of human culture, Morgan did not by any means rest from his scientific labours. A true scientist, he continued to investigate and to generalise from the facts so observed, ever searching for fresh truths, ever seeking further to contribute to the totality of human knowledge.

In 1876 he visited the ancient and the modern pueblos, or native villages of Colorado and New Mexico. An early result was his essay on "Communal Living Among the Village Indians."

He devoted his attentions especially to the architecture and domestic life of the Indians, and his final conclusions on this phase of their life were embodied in his last great book, "Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines," which appeared in 1881. This work contains abundant information on the property relations of the Indians and shows in great detail the communistic habits and modes of thought which pervaded their life. Commenting upon the brotherhood and hospitality of the Redskins Morgan, says in a striking passage :

  "If a man entered an Indian house in any of their villages, whether a villager or a stranger, it was the duty of the women therein to set food before him. . . . This characteristic of barbarous society, wherein food was the principal concern of life, is a remarkable fact. The law of hospitality, as administered by the American aborigines, tended to the final equalisation of subsistence. Hunger and destitution could not exist at one end of an Indian village or in one section of an encampment while plenty prevailed elsewhere in the same village or encampment. "

We have now completed our survey of Morgan's scientific and literary achievements. His important and original work earned for him the name of "the father of American Anthropology." In 1873 he had received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Union College, and in 1880 he was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

At first sight it appears strange that although his vital discoveries were appropriated for their own use by the English anthropologists, to their great discredit they did their utmost to belittle Morgan, and as far as possible ignored, and were silent regarding, his meritorious achievements. No doubt this, in part, was due to the severe blow which Morgan had dealt to the prestige of the English School by causing the collapse of their pet theory—that of McLennan. But, worse still, Morgan had criticised the social power of property, and such criticism could not be tolerated by the intellectuals of the hothouse of industrial capitalism, the birth-place of Laisser-Faire "political economy." (*)

Morgan's home was a rendezvous for the leading American scholars and scientists of the day. In his own library Morgan would often gather with a number of young students for the systematic study of ethnology and also of the works of Herbert Spencer, whom he greatly admired.

Morgan took a practical interest in political activity and in 1861 was elected to the N.Y. Assembly, later, in 1868, becoming a Senator. He used all his influence in the endeavour to improve the conditions of life and the treatment meted out to his life-long friends, the Red-men—dying remnants of a splendid race, broken and bespoiled by the fateful finger that writes the story of economic evolution.

Morgan reached through his studies the very verge of the Socialist conception of society. Had his investigations carried him further into the epoch of civilisation he would probably have realised more completely than he did the vast importance of the struggle of classes arising from those property developments the early stages of which he himself so ably described.

But if his sphere was too narrow to permit of this, it was even less fitted to give Morgan an understanding of the present capitalistic stage of society. It required a man of equal intellect working, observing, analysing, generalising at the very hub-centre of the capitalist world market —London, and this role was played by Marx, in whom Capitalism as well as Socialism found its Morgan.

The works of Marx and Morgan are in a very real sense interrelated and complementary. Together they laid secure foundations for a genuine natural science of social life. This Marx clearly recognised and intended to show in a work upon the evolution of society based upon his own researches and those of Morgan. Unfortunately this, which might possibly have been Marx's master work, was never accomplished—ill health and death intervened. But Marx's great co-worker, Frederick Engels, seeing the urgent necessity of such a work, himself undertook the task and produced that classic of Marxian sociology, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," which first appeared in Germany in 1884.

This little book of Engels' was the first real appreciation, outside of America, of the pioneer work done by Morgan. Passing through several editions and translated into numerous languages, it has been the means of spreading a knowledge of Morgan's work amongst members of the working class the world over. To this day, in fact, "Ancient Society" is read and discussed wherever class conscious working-men gather together, while, on the other hand, the average bourgeois student is ignorant, often enough, of Morgan's very name and position in science, let alone being conversant with his writings.

In the estimation of the proletarian student Lewis H. Morgan, by the originality and vast importance of his scientific achievements, occupies a place in that imperishable trinity of nineteenth century science —Marx, Darwin, Morgan.

R. W. Housley.

(*) Of late years there has been a change of attitude, and in addition to the praise of Edward Jenks, we have Dr. Haddon in his "History of Anthropology'' referring to Morgan as the greatest sociologist of the nineteenth century.

(Concluded.)

Lewis Henry Morgan. An Account and Appreciation of his Life Work. (1919)

From the September 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

The year 1818, which witnessed the birth of Karl Marx, also saw the birth, on Nov. 21st, of Lewis Henry Morgan, a man whose investigations into the nature of primitive human society were as epoch-making as were those of Marx into the structure of modern capitalism. Born at Aurora, Cayuga County, in the State of New York, and of "middle-class" parents, Morgan, after the customary school education, graduated, at the age of 22, at Union College, N.Y. Afterwards he underwent a four years course in law, and in 1844 was admitted to the Bar. In partnership with his old schoolmate, afterwards Judge G. F. Danforth, Morgan practised successfully as a lawyer in Rochester, where he made his home.

Studies of the Indians.

While at college young Morgan had become deeply interested in the Red Indians of the Iroquois tribes, the remnants of a once powerful and widespread people, in the State of New York. After his graduation he joined with a number of young enthusiasts in Aurora who, like himself, were fond of Indian lore, forming a club or society which was called the Grand Order of the Iroquois. The "Order," which was of the nature of a secret society, also appears to have been known as the "Gordian Knot."

The idea of its founders was to extend the organisation over the tribal territory which the Iroquois in times past had occupied. Branches were to be established wherever a settlement of the Iroquois was known to have existed, and "council-fires" held at night for the discussion of matters relating to the Indians.

In order to study more intimately their life and institutions Morgan actually went into an Iroquois settlement, and there lived as one of themselves for periods which eventually totalled several years. So well did he gain the confidence and affection of the Indians that in 1847 he was permitted to formally enter, by adoption, into the Hawk gens of the Seneca tribe. They recognised in him a fraternal link between the white men and the red, and gave him the name Ta-ya-da-wah-kugh, meaning "one lying across."

The first results of his investigations Morgan embodied in a series of papers which were read to the "Grand Order," and also to the New York Historical Society, of which he was a member. Subsequently they were published as "Letters on the Iroquois;" under the pen-name of "Skenandoah" in the "American Review" during 1847, and later appeared in other journals.

Among Morgan's closest associates was a pure-blooded Seneca Indian called Ha-sa-no-an-da, who had adopted the English name of Ely S. Parker. He was well educated and a civil engineer by profession. Hasanoanda possessed an exceedingly full knowledge of Iroquois customs and institutions and was himself a Sachem or peace-chief of the Senecas, his name signifying "Keeper of the Western door of the Long House" (see below).

With Parkers' assistance Morgan was able to carry his researches into the past history of the Iroquois and to complete his first great work on primitive society, "The League of the Iroquois," which he published in 1851. This book which Morgan, out of recognition for his services, inscribed to Ely S. Parker, was written, as the author says in the preface, "to encourage a kinder feeling towards the Indian founded upon a truer knowledge of his civil and domestic institutions, and of his capabilities for future elevation," surely, in view of the brutal treatment meted out to the Red-man by the Paleface who had robbed him, a noble ideal.

The first scientific account of an Indian people ever written, this book contains a detailed description based on personal observation of the society, religion, ceremonial, games, art, craftsmanship, and language of the Iroquois. A new edition appeared in 1904.

The league of tribes was the highest type of social organisation achieved by the American Indians. That of the Iroquois was formed in the fifteenth century and consisted of five, and later of six, tribes, the Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas, Onondagas, and the Tucaroras. The term "Iroquois" is believed to be of French origin. They called themselves Ho-de-no-sau-nee, the "People of the Long House," the latter allusion being to the Indian communal house which was chosen as tie symbol of the League. At the time when Morgan wrote, however, the League was but a shadow of its former self, having lost, with the coming of the Whites, the position which had made it a social and military power of no mean importance.

In 1855 Morgan was concerned in an engineering scheme to build a railway through the wilderness of North Michigan, and in conjunction therewith performed some practical exploration which was much needed in this, at that time, little known region. When thus engaged he made some original investigations into the social habits and constructive ability of the beaver, an animal which was exceedingly abundant in this area. His results were embodied in "The American Beaver and His Works," published in 1867. One of the most perfect of zoological monographs, this work drew praise from Darwin, although he considered that Morgan had underestimated the power of instinct and thus rated too highly the reasoning powers of the beaver.

In 1856 Morgan made the acquaintance of Prof. Henry, of the Smithsonian Institute, and of Agissiz, the famous American naturalist, both of whom encouraged him to continue his unique Indian studies.

Studies in Kinship and Sex Relations.

While on a visit in 1858 to Marquette on Lake Superior, one of the terminii of the proposed railway, Morgan visited a camp of the Ojibwa tribe and there discovered the same peculiar system of recognising family relationships which he had found among the Iroquois. According to this system a man referred to the children of his brothers as his own "sons" and "daughters," and all these "cousins" as they would be termed by us, called one another "brother" or "sister." Likewise with the children of several sisters.

The discovery that this system existed among the Ojibwa appears to have been somewhat of a revelation to Morgan, and he now pursued his ethnological researches with redoubled vigour, visiting in the next three or four years different tribes in the extreme West and as far North as Canada. He found, as he had begun to expect, that the same system of kinship was characteristic of practically all the tribes in North America.

After this Morgan, with the assistance of the United States Government, carried his investigations into other lands. Carefully prepared lists of questions were forwarded to officials, explorers, and missionaries in different parts of the world. Most of these lists were returned with the desired information, and by this means Morgan was successful in acquiring a vast amount of data bearing on the sex relations and kinship of numerous peoples the world over.

It was a stupendous task to sort out and classify this mass of evidence, but Morgan performed it with great ability and remarkable results. These were set forth in a preliminary essay published in the "Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences" in 1868.

The complete and tabulated results of these investigations appeared in the "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family," published in 1871 as Vol. XVII. of the "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge" by the "Institute." This work, containing as it does the kinship systems of one hundred and thirty-nine distinct peoples comprising about four-fifths of the human race, is one of the landmarks of ethnology and denoted the entry of exact scientific method into the study of primitive society.

Frederick Engels in his "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," thus summarises Morgan's conclusions :

1. The kinship system of the American Indians is also in vogue in Asia, and in a somewhat modified form among numerous tribes of Africa and Australia.
2. This system finds a complete explanation in a certain form of communal marriage now in
process of decline in Hawaii and some Australian islands.
3. By the side of this marital form, there is in practice on the same islands a system of 
kinship only explicable by a still more primeval and now extinct form of communal marriage.

Morgan was led by his researches to the belief that unrestricted sexual intercourse had been the habit of primeval mankind. Progressive restriction upon intercourse between near blood relatives then resulted in two successive forms of group or communal marriage in which a group of men were common husbands to a similar group of women. This custom, by rendering actual fatherhood uncertain, necessarily resulted in the tracing of decent through females only, a fact which had already been inferred by Bachofen in his "Mother Right" (1861) from a study of classical mythology.

Further restriction led to a loose "pairing family"—the intercourse and co-habitation of one man with one woman—and then, as Morgan subsequently showed, the rise of private property formed the basis of the historical from of monogamy, with its permanent union and male inheritance.

In treating anomalous kinship-systems as the vestiges of extinct marital and family institutions, and in coming forth as the ethnological champion of the theory of original promiscuity and of group marriage, Morgan encountered the opposition of the "established school" of anthropologists led McLennan. Just as Owen, Virchow, and other reactionary scientists endeavoured to save the "respectability" of man kind by denying, in opposition to the Darwinians, our animal ancestry, so Westmarck, Andrew Lang and others fitted bourgeois morality upon the primitive savage by declaring, against Morgan and even Lubbock, that human sex-intercourse had never been promiscuous and that monogamy was its "natural" and original form.

Morgan's views on this matter have, in the main, been amply vindicated by the more recent painstaking researches of Spencer and Gillen into the communal marriage systems of the Australian aborigines.

The Roots of Cultural Progress.

After the publication of his ''Systems of Consanguinity'' Morgan pursued the investigation of several series of facts which had attracted his attention whilst accumulating the materials for that important work.

The only literary fruits of his work during the following five or six years were a number of essays on the ancient culture of Central America—a line of enquiry which greatly interested him. Between 1869 and 1876 there appeared in the form of magazine articles "The Seven Cities of Chibola," "Montezuma's Dinner," and "The Houses of the Mound Builders."

Morgan was something of a classical scholar, and it gradually became apparent to him that there was a more intimate affinity between the social institutions of early Greece and Rome and those of existing barbarian peoples than was usually supposed.

He also became aware of the great changes wrought in social and cultural institutions by progressive improvements in man's means of living.

Thus by a variety of channels he arrived at the conception of the essential unity in the course and method of evolution throughout the entire human race. The great antiquity and animal origin of mankind had already been established, but little knowledge had as yet been gained as to the social conditions of existence among primitive men.

Morgan was among the first to scientifically penetrate into the social status of man in the stages proceeding the patriarchal system which, in conformity with Hebrew tradition, most earlier writers, even the learned Sir Henry Maine ("Ancient Law," Chap. 5), had considered to be the dawn of society.

In 1877 Morgan gave to the world the result of forty years study in his chief literary work, "Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilisation." The book is divided into four parts. In the first Morgan shows that the basis of all human progress lies in the discovery or invention of artificial aids to existence in the form of implements and technical processes, and that these processes lead to new methods of living, generating new needs and producing a gradual increase in man's knowledge of and control over natural forces.

The author divides the evolution of mankind into seven stages, each marked off by outstanding discoveries. Thus the lowest or first stage in the period of savagery commences with man, hardly differentiated from the rest of the anthropoid stock, existing as a tropical tree-dweller and consuming raw roots, fruits, and small animals. During this period the first simple form of language was developed and rude tools of stone, shell, bone, and similar materials began to be used.

Then came the making of fires, which made cooking possible and raised man to the second stage of Savagery. Fishing was now adopted and by encouraging migrations along river banks and coasts assisted in the dispersal of the race over the continents. The invention of the bow and arrow ushers in the third stage, in which the savage was equipped for the hunting of large game.

With the art of making pottery the period of Barbarism begins. In its first stage crude picture-writing and probably weaving were evolved. Primitive agriculture commenced to wards the close of this period. Then with the domestication of cattle, sheep, and other hoofed animals in the Eastern Hemisphere and the improvement of agriculture in Central and South America, the middle stage of Barbarism would be reached. This period, in its use of the softer metals, corresponds with the Bronze Age of the archaeologists.

The upper status of Barbarism was reached only in the Eastern Hemisphere when iron smelting was achieved. This great discovery, which placed in man's hands the means of procuring tools of great hardness and durability, gave an unprecedented impetus to agriculture and other forms of production. The invention of alphabetic writing closed the epoch of Barbarism and ushered in the era of written history—of Civilisation.

Morgan's orderly classification of the cultural history of mankind was a marked advance upon all previous attempts. It is still, over forty years after its formulation, recognised as the most adequate and useful of the many schemes which have been evolved (see article "Civilisation," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition).

To Socialists Morgan's classification is especially of interest inasmuch as it is based upon the principle that "the great epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence" ("Ancient Society," p 19), a thesis fundamentally identical with the Materialist Conception of History of Marx and Engels.

R. W. Housley

(To be Concluded.)

Link to Part 2.

A common humanity (2006)

Book Review from the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ancient Americans: Rewriting the History of the New World’. By Charles C. Mann. (London, Granta Books, 2005)

This book has three central claims, put forward with all the skill and understanding of a working popular science journalist. That pre-Columbus the Americas were more populous than many have previously supposed; that humans have been in the Americas longer than supposed; and that the people there had shaped their own environments to a terrific extent – far from being the unspoilt wilderness of colonial lore.

In most of this Mann is merely communicating an emerging academic consensus that still has not filtered out into the popular domain. He highlights how children’s schoolbooks still repeat stories about Indian life, culture and history that have subsequently been disproven. He also highlights how various vested interests have used the ideological constructions based on the previous histories for opposite ends, both aggressive industrialists and ecologists promoting various simplifying myths of naive Indians living in harmony with untamed nature.

Essentially, whilst without giving any definite backing to any particular population estimate, the book avers that the ‘high counters’ are now the dominant strand of demographic historiography. That most of the Americas were covered by human civilisations that would have been a match for most of the colonialist forces, if they had not succumbed to disease – disease that spread in advance of the European’s arrival (indicating intercourse between the Indian civilisations) – disease that possibly wiped out about a fifth of the human race at that time.

Mann demonstrates how much of the habitat inhabited by Indians was inhospitable, but that they had, to use his metaphor, terraformed their environment. He uses the example of the Maya collapse – hundred of years prior to the arrival of the Europeans – to show how the environment humans had created could fall apart when neglected (as in this case) by civil war.

In this context, he demonstrates that the Americas had an independent discovery of agriculture, to the point of suggesting that Amazonian Indians effectively planted orchards to make good use of the forests difficult soil. He suggests that there were civilisations as venerable in their size and antiquity to equal the more famous supposed homes of civilisation in China and Sumeria (present day Iraq).

He uses one case, the domestication of maize, to show what American civilisation has contributed to the sum of human achievement, and highlights the crushing irony that it was the importation of maize to Africa, which allowed the population growth that made the slave trade possibly (the slaves were, it should be remembered, needed in part because the indigenous population of the Americas had died out).

Mann suggests that the image of the pristine wilderness was created by the fact that humans had ceased to manage these environments, that the so called savagery found in part of the Americas was not stone age tribes living lives without time or change, but the products of collapse and devastation.

This is hopeful stuff for socialists. If true, it confirms a common humanity shared by all the humans on the planet, and offers the prospect of adding rich unbroadcast stories of human achievement.

Pik Smeet

Leonard Peltier and the primal needs of Capital* (2004)

From Issue 19 of the World Socialist Review

In a remote section of South Dakota just north of Nebraska lies an Indian reservation known as Pine Ridge. At one time largely agricultural, it became hugely attractive to the U.S. government when it was discovered that beneath the Indian lands lay one of the largest uranium reserves in the United States. All through the years, treaties with the Indians had been consistently violated because of the major mineral reserves beneath the Indian territories.

When Pine Ridge became the focus of the United States government, the Indian residents were strongly opposed to uranium development on their turf. Bitterness grew as problems were exacerbated with the increasing threat of U.S. intervention. Turning to the American Indian Movement (AIM) for assistance led to military conflict with the FBI, which refused to listen to the complaints of the Indians. The struggle lasted 71 days, resulting in the deaths of two Pine Ridge natives and the outlawing of all activities at Pine Ridge.

During the following three years, now referred to as the “Reign of Terror,” violent assaults continued to take place in which vast numbers of Indians were murdered or maimed. With the government intent on destroying the AIM and thereby removing a major obstacle in their plans to exploit the uranium booty, homes were burned, shootings and beatings became rampant. So many native Americans were killed that Pine Ridge had the highest annual murder rate in the U.S. Again the AIM came to their assistance, and among those who responded was Leonard Peltier. The conflict led to three murder indictments including that of Leonard Peltier, accused of shooting two FBI agents. No evidence was ever introduced to support the accusation. Subsequently, Peltier escaped to Canada, convinced that he would never receive a fair trial in the U.S. Less than a year later, he was apprehended.

Myrtle Poor Bear was an Indian woman who had never met Leonard Peltier. Terrified under interrogation by the FBI, she testified against him. This terror-induced accusation led to the extradition of Peltier to the U.S. All of her incriminating statements were later withdrawn, and Myrtle Poor Bear confessed that her fear of the FBI had led her to make false statements. With the government determined to pin the guilt on Peltier and thus remove the bête noire from their uranium quest, her confessions were thrown aside and ignored.

Despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, the trial was rigged against him with perjury and manufactured evidence. No witness was ever found who could identify Leonard as the man who shot and killed two FBI agents. Hundreds of thousands of pages of critical evidence pinpointing the unprovoked attack on Pine Ridge were withheld from the trial.

The events here described and the part played by Peltier were detailed in a book by Peter Matthieson, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. This revealing report was kept out of print for eight years, while the FBI sued the author and publisher for libel. Although the Supreme Court eventually denied the suit, the stunning evidence produced by the book was unavailable at the time of Leonard Peltier’s trial.

Today Pine Ridge has an 86 percent unemployment rate, the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. The government’s vindictiveness toward the Lakota people led to the ruin of innumerable lives. The ongoing penal servitude of Leonard Peltier at Leavenworth Prison is the direct consequence of the FBI’s unabated pressure to keep him confined.

Despite worldwide appeals from human-rights organizations, and the publicity given to the merits of his case, 500 FBI agents marched in Washington to oppose clemency for him. They continue to use their authority to thwart all efforts to obtain his freedom, now denied him for 28 years.

Leonard Peltier is not in prison for the murder of two FBI agents. Of that he is demonstrably not guilty. Leonard Peltier is in prison because he is a potential threat to governmental forces intent on exploiting the mineral resources that lie buried beneath In- dian territory. The facts of Leonard’s conviction are well known. Well known also is the bitter massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, which left an entire community devastated.** Terror-stricken families and ruined lives draw little compassion from those whose motives are purely profit-driven. They are “collateral damage.” The drive for profit under capitalism overrides all human considerations. Like the conflict in Iraq, the huge loss of lives and the obliteration of the infrastructures are a price worth paying for the control of huge oil reserves needed for the operation of the capitalist machine.

Such reports are not unique to America. All over the world human values are subordinated to the primal needs of capital.

Indeed, they scream out for a change from this power-driven, cash-oriented social system to one that emphasizes cooperation, and in which human values are the measure of all human action. They send a message to all who will listen that the world hungers for a society that will eliminate needless suffering and re- place it with opportunities for all human beings to lead fulfilling lives.

Mardon Cooper

* Sources: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anthony Rayson (Prison Abolition), Matt Sherman (AIM) and Leonard Peltier (“Prison Writings”).

** The massacre at Wounded Knee took place on December 29, 1890. See, for example, http:// www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm. The siege at Wounded Knee, referred to above, began on February 27, 1973 and lasted 71 days.

Leonard Peltier has provided us with words that should resonate with those who share this vision:

The Message 

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
Just as doing nothing is an act. 

Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There’s no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility. 

What you do is who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message. 

You are the message.

The McMasters (1971)

Film Review from the July 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The McMasters (Directed by Alf Kjellin.)

Benjie, a negro, returns after four years civil-warring on the side of the North to the ranch of his adopted father, McMaster in the deep south.

McMaster (Burl Ives) is the only one to offer a welcome, since Benjie’s blue uniform is resented in the Bible-thumping, Reconstruction — pulverised, poverty stricken, secessionist, racist cattle community.

Benjie gets half the ranch from McMaster, who realises he is past managing it alone. The ranch hands leave in disgust. Benjie saves some half-starved Indians from a lynching for cattle-rustling, and offers them work which they accept. Benjie’s generosity to his employees is partly fired by his realisation that he himself is, to the hostile community, scum like the Indians: "Everyone knows them niggers aint people— they aint got souls”, is how the town storekeeper justifies riding with the local Ku Klux Klan, and brainwashes his young son, who already longs to watch his first lynching.

Benjie gets an Indian squaw as "a gift"(!) from the tribe of grateful wage-slaves. Finally Benjie’s incongruous landowner status, his bloody defence of his cattle from salt-poisoning Klansmen, his marriage in the white man’s church to his squaw, his new found self-respect and refusal to be intimidated into selling-out drive the local Klan, led by Gilby, (Jack Palance) the confederate war-hero embittered by the loss of his arm, to attempt to lynch him. The first attempt ‘only’ gets Benjie’s wife, Robin, raped and two Klansmen killed before they are driven off the ranch.

The cattle season over, Benjie realises that with the Indians who have returned to their village, he and McMaster will be unable to protect the ranch or his wife in the event of further brawls. He sends Robin back to her tribe for safety, and tries to enlist the aid of the Indians but the tribal elders make it clear that Benjie is in their eyes the same as the whites, who, as property owners will spill blood for it, and they want no part in a property war . . . "The land belongs to no-one—you like us Benjie, you homeless”.

The inevitable showdown with the Klan follows—a burning cross is the signal for a bloodthirsty finale in which McMaster is shot dead, the ranch buildings are razed and Benjie himself is only saved from a coldblooded burning by the inexplicable intervention of the younger Indian braves—his former employees—led by the articulate primitive communist ideologist, brother of Benjie’s wife. Gilby is killed, the Klan are temporarily routed, but after Benjie recovers from his wounds at the Indian village, to the complete bewilderment of Robin’s brother he once again staggers back to rebuild his smallholding, to face the Klan and probable death with Robin.

Robin’s brother's cries ring out as the film closes: "You’re crazy Benjie, you got no home, you like us, you got no home”. . . but Benjie, pathetically mesmerised by his title deeds, already has his values fixed—property before his own, his friends, his wife, his Indian brothers’ lives.

All in all, a film expressing all the contradictions of the class and caste-ridden society of post civil war America. The Indian elders alone attract sympathy, with their humanism and refusal to sacrifice themselves for property. But they, one senses, are doomed to an ever-more precarious nomadic existence and probable extinction from starvation (despite their rustling activities) or from epidemic.

The film will appeal to all those who flock to watch ketchup being spilled in great quantities, who are titillated and thrilled by the depiction of inexorable violence. The stark scenes in it are overtly commercial. No relief from the all-pervading atmosphere of brutalising and dehumanising 1865 Bible Belt Society is offered, indeed the producer seems to want us to project the despair into the present day. Certainly no relief is realistically possible in the historical context of absolute scarcity and the dominance of property, status and compensatory racialist ideas do not lend themselves to any. But a hundred years later scarcity is a myth; competition and the hostility, mutual suspicion, atomization and savagery it engenders are archaic and unnecessary; the Benjies of the world need no longer cling to tangibles at such a cost; the day of the Indian is near again, at a much higher and more secure level of technology and culture.

C. H.

Human Nature? (1934)

From the September 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

The critics of the Socialist case are legion, but the diversity of their arguments is very limited. At street corner or in public hall, from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, in Great Britain and abroad, one hears the same arguments, couched in similar words, from those who would refute the case for Socialism. It would almost appear as if they vied with one another in their efforts to be unoriginal.

One of these stock arguments is the one which the Socialist designates as "The Human Nature argument.” It is frequently the first question which rises to the lips of the but recently interested worker, and it is often the last line of defence of the opponent who has been driven from every other point of vantage by the logic of the Socialist case.

It is usually worded thus: “Ah! But you cannot change human nature”; or “Socialism is desirable, but human nature would not allow it.” However the query is worded, the answer is the same—the Socialist calls upon the members of the working class to organise consciously and politically for the capture of the machinery of government in order that this machinery may be used to establish a Socialist system of society. A revolutionary proposition this, which human nature and the laws which govern social development demand. Let us explain.

First of all, what is this human nature? What is there in the nature of human beings which can prevent the establishment of Socialism? It is the nature of the human being to be social. Man is essentially a social being, not merely because he enjoys the companionship of his fellows, but out of sheer necessity. It has been a part of the process by which man has evolved from a lowly primitive state to his present "exalted” civilised condition. Had he not developed a social sentiment early in this process of evolution, even before he assumed the form of man, the species would have become extinct. And to-day no one ever dreams of man living the life of a Robinson Crusoe, with, of course, the possible exception of some imaginary beings who people the textbooks of the orthodox economists and capitalist apologists. So let us repeat, it is the nature of humans to be social.

“Ah!” we can hear the critics saying, “that’s agreed, but man, having become a social being, then proceeds to behave towards his fellow men in a most unsociable manner.” Therein our critics reveal their error, for in using the word “behave” they expose their illogical argument. Human nature and human behaviour are not quite identical, although one is the product of the other. We have said that man has become a social being out of sheer necessity, likewise his behaviour is determined by necessity, the necessity to live. Man needs to live and in order to live he must have food, and some shelter from the elements. It is in order that he may procure these that he enters into relations with his fellows, or, in other words, forms society, and it is the manner by which he procures his subsistence that determines the relations entered into, or, the form which society takes. When, as was once the case, the method of obtaining the necessities of life was by the use of such primitive tools as the bow and arrow, then men's relationships were framed accordingly, and most certainly did not include such relations as those of employer and employee, nor did this early society include such institutions as trade unions. The means of production being primitive, and, in consequence, each member of society being able to produce only just sufficient for his own maintenance, it was not possible for one man to enslave another. A man who needs to devote all his time to obtaining the things necessary for his own existence is useless as a slave and so, in primitive society, the institution of slavery did not arise. Men lived in tribes, and within the tribe the things necessary to the tribe's existence were communally owned. This determined the behaviour of tribesmen to one another. Many explorers and travellers have testified to the behaviour of men living under such conditions, as, for example, the following.

Lewis Morgan, who lived for a considerable period among North American Indians, in his book, “Ancient Society,” wrote: “If a man entered an Iroquois house, whether a villager, a tribesman or a stranger, and at whatever hour of the day, it was the duty of the woman of the house to set food before him. If hungry, he eats, if not hungry, courtesy required that he should taste the food and thank the giver.”

Likewise, Paul Lafargue, in his “Evolution of Property,” quotes from James Adair's "History of the American Indians": “To be narrow-hearted, especially to those in want, or to any of their own family, is accounted a great crime, and to reflect scandal on the rest of the tribe."

The same author quotes Catlin, who also lived among the wildest of Indian tribes in North America, as saying: "Morality and virtue, I venture to say, the civilised world need not undertake to teach them.” And men behaved like this when, and because, the means of life were commonly owned; and the means of life were commonly owned because it was the necessary form of ownership at that stage of social development.

Just one other of Lafargue's references from the book already mentioned, a quotation from the Jesuit Charlevoix: "The brotherly sentiments of the Redskins are doubtless in part ascribable to the fact that the words MINE and THINE, . . . are all unknown as yet to the savages. The protection they extend to the orphans, the widows and the infirm, the hospitality which they exercise in so admirable a manner, are, in their eyes, but a consequence of the conviction which they hold that all things should be common to all men.”

Since those times, in Europe at least, the means of production have evolved from the bow- and-arrow stage to the present highly complicated machine stage. The spear has given place to the plough, the hand-operated machine to the modem mechanical wonder, the horse-drawn cart to the motor-car, or steam-driven or electrically-driven train or tramway system. Hand-in-hand with this development has gone on a change in the relationships between the individuals who make up society and a corresponding change in the social form, until to-day we live in capitalist society wherein the relationships are based on the private ownership of the means of living, with the consequent division into classes of those who own these means and those who own nothing but their ability to work, their labour-power.

Within capitalist society production is for sale, even the energy of the workers. Before the worker can draw his wage he must sell his energy, for which the wage is the price. Before the capitalist can draw his dividend the products of the workers' toil must be sold. Buying and selling —always buying and selling. It is the very essence of the system we live under. Worker must compete with worker in an effort to sell his labour-power; shopkeeper must compete with shopkeeper; combine with combine; nation with nation.

Competition implies struggle, struggle means strife. Woe to him who gives up the struggle, the penalties are heavy. Nations fight it out in wars, combines seek to establish and maintain monopolies, shopkeepers cut prices and the losers pass, by way of the bankruptcy court, into the ranks of the dispossessed, there to compete with millions of others for an opportunity to sell their labour- power to the highest bidder. Each must scramble with his fellows to get the necessities of life and can only rise by climbing on the backs of others.

It is this that determines human behaviour—the necessity to get a living. It is this that our critics call human nature. It is this that makes men Socialists. It is this that determines that Socialism must follow capitalism. Human nature has not changed since man first appeared, nor will it while he exists; but human behaviour—that undergoes a process of continuous change. The workers to-day, realising more and more that their cut-throat behaviour results in a weakening of their power to resist the encroachments made on their conditions by their masters, are changing that behaviour, as witness the manner in which some, who, although disagreeing with the actions of fellow workers in trade disputes, frequently “fall into line” in order to assist in an attempt to achieve some improvement of their lot. The development of society has produced a working class, and that class has evolved its own class conduct, its own behaviour of members towards one another. Class-solidarity it is usually termed, but no matter what it is called, it is part of human behaviour, and when the working class shall overthrow capitalism and establish a system of society in keeping with its own and society's interests, then that new form will, in its turn, determine human behaviour.

The Socialist does not propose a “change of heart,” but a change in the basis of society, a change from private to common ownership of the means of living. No Utopian idea this, but a dire necessity determined by social development. Not the struggle of a sect, but an historical revolutionary movement, guided by principles based on a scientific investigation of society and the laws which govern its development.

When man has access to the wealth he produces, and has no further need to struggle and compete with his fellow men for a portion of that wealth, then, and not till then, will his behaviour correspond with his nature and become social. There can be no “peace on earth” while there remains a class society; there can be but little" “brotherly love” whilst there is capitalism. The solution lies not in exhorting men to be charitable to their enemies, but in establishing a Socialist society wherein men will not be angels, but just men; wherein competition will give place to co-operation, and all humans, without distinction of race or sex, will live secure, full, and pleasurable lives.

W. Waters