Louis Proyect wrote: > Comment by Andrew Tait — January 17, 2010 @ 12:18 pm > > I’ve just read Guns Germs and Steel and I consider Blaut’s critique to be > insupportable and insignificant.
IMHO, Tait is right here (though he doesn't really back up his point). However, we shouldn't abstain from more criticism of GGS. After all, Diamond totally omits the Indian subcontinent in his discussion. Like any popular book written by a non-expert in anthropology (who arrogantly presumes to be smart enough to write a grand synthetic work in anthropology and macro-history), I'm sure there are many other problems. > Comment by patello — February 2, 2010 @ 5:37 am > > Dear Andrew, don’t you feel it strange to see that remarkable scientific > committment to (alleged) historical materialism coalesce in naive and > mainstream political conclusions? Don’t you question yourself on this? Are > you really sure that Marx and Engels method was that of Diamond? For all > that you wrote, its seems you have no idea of what historical materialism > actually is. Diamond fits with a common bourgeois view. The historical materialist content of GGS is far in the past. It's when it gets to the present that he gets into "naive and mainstream political conclusions" in that book and in COLLAPSE. (Marx referred to the way in which "... forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions." -- Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1, s. 4, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4.) > First, Marx and Engels, the former in particular, openly declared their > works on precapitalist forms of production to be mere sketches, not complete > and reliable models of world-historical development. I won’t bother quoting > what every serious reader of Marx perfecly knows. Marx is fully aware of the > methodological, and so -in the last instance- political, implications of > being focused on Europe. ... Tait -- and I -- disagree with Blaut's view that Diamond is "totally focused on Europe." As I've said, if there's any part of the world that Diamond sees as the "center" of his theory it's Eurasian ecological zone, which for him includes North Africa (but excludes the subcontinent). > Failure or persistent neglect to recognize this whole methodological problem > is a common feature of most litterature on supposed “failures” or > “successes” of *whatever_you_want*. ... In Diamond, "failure" and "success" have a very specific and concrete meaning. For example, in actual history, it was the Spanish that beat the Incas militarily, not vice-versa. So in these terms, the Spanish were the "winners" even though morally speaking they were horrible pigs (an unfair insult to pigs). Put another way, Diamond does not make the the assertion that the Incas were less noble than the Spanish just because they lost the war. > Diamond is indeed born out of this anti-relational mechanicistic trend, > whose last field of application is that of ecology, perfectly on time with > the overall cultural neo-malthusian turn that commenced with postmodern > appraisal of Heidegger, “return to nature” and so on, widening more and more > at the point that today the ecological common sense can provide both the > “imperfect_human_nature” kind of Hayekian argument to legitimate the crisis > while banning every attempt to political action as utopian perfectibilism > and a new cultural framework for the enterprenurial and financial community > to forsee and build up the new fronteer of green tecnologies and > eco-businness. ... This puts Diamond into a context in which it's unclear that he belongs. His theory isn't "anti-relational" as much as it focuses on relations that don't fit with most modern Marxist and dependency theory perspectives, i.e., the competition of various ethnic groups within ecological zones. (Class relations show up only at the end of GGS.) I don't know if his view in GGS is "mechanistic," since this author doesn't make a case but instead assumes his conclusion. The fact that mechanistic ecology's timing was totally wrong seems totally irrelevant if Diamond's GGS doesn't fit into its rubric. > In Diamond, we see the reversal of the most famous insight given by Marx > about human nature. Lightyears away from the irrational holism of > dialectical materialism which pretended to fuse physical nature and human > nature, Marx stated that these two spheres are progressively intertwining > themselves, albeit remaining discernible theoretical objects notwithstanding > their evolution. The partial interpenetration of “first” and “second” nature > reflects itself in the method of historical matherialism, which conceive the > progress of human being as the progressive social signifiance of its > relations to nature. Social, that is, under the field of increasing > possibilities out of wich a single determined material history emerges. An > historical materialist account of human societies must therefore understand > nature as a relative residual, in the sense that its presence and barriers > do evolves along with human societies so facing them with new problems, but > in the end the solution given, good or bad, is less and less linearly linked > with the initial signal of nature. It is more and more up to humans to > decide. This does not ensure that the response will be always the right one, > and maybe nor that over the long term a self-correcting mechanism will > suggest it, albeit on this many progressive ecologists and biologists like > Levins and Lewontin do point out that the integration of human “artificial” > growth on ecological systems is a two-side process, implying an equal > correction of living support systems to human action. But still, Diamond’s > argument is pretty much the reversal of this. He posits a bunch of hard > worked environmental data at the beginning of history, using the rest of the > book to linearly unfold the argument. This emphasis on ecological > overdetermination over millennia is not only the opposite of Marx’s well > known humanistic theory of emancipation, but run against his idea of > overdetermination too. Is not by accident, for example, that Marx reflected > about the weight of the past when speaking about politics, not about > nature.... It's unclear that the Diamond of GGS would disagree with this stuff. Note that he doesn't talk about individual "human nature" as somehow fixed as much as about the ethnic groupings (which are presumed to compete with each other). And these groupings change their nature over time, becoming class societies. Even though Diamond's GGS doesn't fit with a lot of Marxian and dependency-theory views (and has some theoretical problems), I think that it makes sense to see some interesting and perhaps-true insights in that book. It's like the way Marx treated Smith or Ricardo: those folks were wrong in a lot of ways but also had a lot of useful insights that Marx built on (after criticizing). He even labeled those two as being "scientific." -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
