Re: M-I: Mythologising Native Americans
Heartfield: The man who is tired of London is tired of life, Dr Johnson said. Like Mark Jones, Louis Proyect's rural idyll is just the inverted projection of his hatred of the masses. It is not that he likes native Americans, its that he doesn't like those teeming masses of immigrant Americans, with their vulgar cars and music. This is really crude and stupid. I suspect that Heartfield has run out of Marx quotes already. Maybe he should think about posting them over again. That would be more useful than the sort of pop psychology above. As I suspected, LM has a bunch of prepackaged positions that function as some kind of left-libertarian FAQ. Question: Why is it okay that Indians were exterminated? Answer: They stood in the way of the bourgeois revolution. Well, okay. I give permission to James Heartfield to write garbage like this. He is clearly in over his head. I plan to pursue my own goal of coming up with a synthesis of communalism and communism. I agree with Michael Perelman. It is useful that LM provoked the discussion. Now it is up to serious people to finish it. Louis Proyect
Re: M-I: Mythologising Native Americans
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Mander, Shiva and Sale have taken a close look at how such peoples live and come to the conclusion that the city is much more idiotic. I kind of go along with them. Where I part company is in the belief that the answer is some kind of Khmer Rouge reverse population shift. I will have much more to say about this in a few weeks, but this "rural idiocy" thesis has to be confronted and purged from our vocabulary. The ecological crisis of the 21st century is a product of exactly those demographic shifts that Marx and Engels were celebrating. Resolution of the crisis will have to be found in "rural wisdom" itself. People who depend upon and live close to nature have a much better perception of the types of measures that are needed. People like Rigobertu Menchu and American Indian shamans have to be listened to. The man who is tired of London is tired of life, Dr Johnson said. Like Mark Jones, Louis Proyect's rural idyll is just the inverted projection of his hatred of the masses. It is not that he likes native Americans, its that he doesn't like those teeming masses of immigrant Americans, with their vulgar cars and music. This is the original motivation of the idea of the noble savage, the romantic rejection of modern life, the retreat into an idealised past. This kind of idea is commonplace amongst the landed gentry in England. Sir Laurens Van Der Post, close confident of Prince Charles and all round mystic used to wax lyrical about the Kalahari bushmen and their noble simplicity - we all knew that what he really meant was that he didn't like all those pushy industrial workers in Britain. So much easier to have someone that you can patronise from a distance. 'Listen to Shamans' I ask you! The idea that this kind of obscurantist rubbish has got anything to do with socialism is absurd. Fraternally -- James Heartfield
Mythologising Native Americans
My problem with Shiva is her gender essentialism, her romanticism about India's pre-colonial past, her hypocrisy in leading a very cosmopolitan life while recommending that everyone else stay at home, and a very un-nuanced rejection of technology. Just because Monsanto is using biotech to screw peasants around the world doesn't mean that biotech itself is always and everywhere a sinister plot by white imperialist men. Doug There is just as much--if not more--that can be learned from Vandana Shiva, Jerry Mander and Kirkpatrick Sale as can be learned from Judith Butler. Like it or not, these people are a corrective to the "rural idiocy" thesis that is contained in the Communist Manifesto and that you have alluded to many times favorably. This is what Marx and Engels say: "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." This must be rethought. It has tended to distort our perception of the population shifts from Chiapas or Puebla, for example, to Mexico City. Do we believe that there is something "idiotic" about the way that Chiapas Indians live? Is this what Marx and Engels were saying? Mander, Shiva and Sale have taken a close look at how such peoples live and come to the conclusion that the city is much more idiotic. I kind of go along with them. Where I part company is in the belief that the answer is some kind of Khmer Rouge reverse population shift. I will have much more to say about this in a few weeks, but this "rural idiocy" thesis has to be confronted and purged from our vocabulary. The ecological crisis of the 21st century is a product of exactly those demographic shifts that Marx and Engels were celebrating. Resolution of the crisis will have to be found in "rural wisdom" itself. People who depend upon and live close to nature have a much better perception of the types of measures that are needed. People like Rigobertu Menchu and American Indian shamans have to be listened to. The value-system of communalist peoples is much closer to the communist value system that we seek. The problem is the transition to the material conditions which will allow such a revolution in values to take place. Shiva, Mander and Sale have no concept of such a transition. Mostly what they propose is utopian retreat from the class struggle. My thoughts on these questions are still not as clear as I'd like them to be, but after reading Mander carefully, I suspect they will be. Louis Proyect
Re: Mythologising Native Americans
Pardon my intervention in this fascinating discussion, but weren't Marx and Engels referring to "rural idiocy" in the context of rural life in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in which the rural population was imprisoned by superstition, ignorance, and technical backwardness in subservience to a landed gentry? Second question: Is our objection as critics of capitalism (and dare I say, proponents of socialism) to urbanization per se or to capitalism and its consequences under circumstances of urbanization? Should we celebrate (romanticize) rural life for its own sake, ignoring the intellectually and culturally stultifying charateristics of rural life under conditions of capitalism and it predecessors? Third question: Would not it be possible to construct a socialist alternative that integrates the most uplifting elements of both urban and rural existence, bringing the cultural and technical advantages of urbanization to rural life while bringing ecological sustainability and rational planning to the lives of urban inhabitants? Last question: For those who are tempted to romanticize the lives of Amazonian indians or the simplicity of rural life, how many currently have adopted anything approaching that kind of lifestyle? How many have actually lived for an extended period in rural areas? How many would forfeit their privileges in urban universities in favor of that life style? How many would even be on this list if they had assiduously pursued that lifestyle over the last 10-20 years? In solidarity, Michael E. At 11:20 AM 1/5/98 -0500, Louis Proyect wrote: This is what Marx and Engels say: "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." This must be rethought. It has tended to distort our perception of the population shifts from Chiapas or Puebla, for example, to Mexico City. Do we believe that there is something "idiotic" about the way that Chiapas Indians live? Is this what Marx and Engels were saying? Mander, Shiva and Sale have taken a close look at how such peoples live and come to the conclusion that the city is much more idiotic. I kind of go along with them. Where I part company is in the belief that the answer is some kind of Khmer Rouge reverse population shift. I will have much more to say about this in a few weeks, but this "rural idiocy" thesis has to be confronted and purged from our vocabulary. The ecological crisis of the 21st century is a product of exactly those demographic shifts that Marx and Engels were celebrating. Resolution of the crisis will have to be found in "rural wisdom" itself. People who depend upon and live close to nature have a much better perception of the types of measures that are needed. People like Rigobertu Menchu and American Indian shamans have to be listened to. The value-system of communalist peoples is much closer to the communist value system that we seek. The problem is the transition to the material conditions which will allow such a revolution in values to take place. Shiva, Mander and Sale have no concept of such a transition. Mostly what they propose is utopian retreat from the class struggle. My thoughts on these questions are still not as clear as I'd like them to be, but after reading Mander carefully, I suspect they will be. Louis Proyect
Re: Mythologising Native Americans
Michael Eisenscher: Pardon my intervention in this fascinating discussion, but weren't Marx and Engels referring to "rural idiocy" in the context of rural life in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in which the rural population was imprisoned by superstition, ignorance, and technical backwardness in subservience to a landed gentry? Yes, this is correct which is all the more reason not to apply this formula without respect to time and place. It is deeply problematic to use it to describe, for example, the exodus of Mayan Indians to Guatemala City, or Quechuas to Lima, over the past 150 years, especially those who were fortunate to be living on arable land. They paid no tribute to a baron nor needed defense from maurauding bandits. They got the same kick in the teeth that the peasant of the British Isles got, but never received the "benefit" of being able to go to work in a textile mill and look through shop windows at all of the shiny goods they were producing. Latin American Indians have never been absorbed into the capitalist mainstream. They have occupied marginal positions as street vendors, etc. They are the social base for the Sendero Luminoso and it easy to understand why. The schema of the Communist Manifesto of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe has very little application to Latin America. You have to read Andre Gunnar Frank et al to fully understand the class dynamics of Latin America. Finally on the question of "superstition". What is this? Is it the Popul Vuh, the holy book of the Guatemalan Indians? I will probably post some passages from this at some point. Or is it the television shows that most people escape into like X-Files, etc. The statistics on UFO belief in the USA would make Guatemalan Indians chuckle. Second question: Is our objection as critics of capitalism (and dare I say, proponents of socialism) to urbanization per se or to capitalism and its consequences under circumstances of urbanization? Should we celebrate (romanticize) rural life for its own sake, ignoring the intellectually and culturally stultifying charateristics of rural life under conditions of capitalism and it predecessors? Michael, these are precisely the types of questions that get us off-track. They are posed as a series of abstractions, whereas historical materialism has to deal with specific class relations. Of course, it would be nice if everybody could live a couple of blocks from the Fairway grocery and Zabar's like Doug Henwood, but this is not feasible. This type of pleasant urban life is intimately related to and a function of the hell that is Mexico City. The corncupia of produce that greets you when you walk into the Fairway comes from third-world countries that are being systematically plundered by the USA. The flowers, mangoes and tomatoes very likely come from Mexico and the swarthy man of Indian descent standing guard over them is likely from the state of Puebla, which has been turned into a vast export agriculture plant for US consumption. Third question: Would not it be possible to construct a socialist alternative that integrates the most uplifting elements of both urban and rural existence, bringing the cultural and technical advantages of urbanization to rural life while bringing ecological sustainability and rational planning to the lives of urban inhabitants? That's the topic of my final post. The answer is yes, thank your lucky stars. Ditch your gas-guzzler but everything else will be quite lovely. I promise. Last question: For those who are tempted to romanticize the lives of Amazonian indians or the simplicity of rural life, how many currently have adopted anything approaching that kind of lifestyle? How many have actually lived for an extended period in rural areas? How many would forfeit their privileges in urban universities in favor of that life style? How many would even be on this list if they had assiduously pursued that lifestyle over the last 10-20 years? This is just the wrong tack to take. It rapidly degenerates into the sort of hairshirt attitude that typified the 1960s. The fight is not over who is a fake because they refuse to go live in a teepee. It is rather over the right of self-determination for people who want to live according to their own customs. It really doesn't matter if Vandana Shiva takes a jet plane to travel four corners of the world to denounce the Narmada Dam and similar projects. This is besides the point. The poor villagers who will lose everything need champions for their cause. The choice for these villagers is not between subsistence farming and a co-op three blocks from Zabars. It is between subsistence farming and begging on the streets. Louis Proyect
Re: M-I: Mythologising Native Americans
Louis Proyect wrote: This is the 150th anniversery of the Communist Manifesto. Mike Albert's attack on the Manifesto has been circulating on the Internet and is the subject of an intense debate on Marxism-International between Doug Henwood and Chris Warren, a dogmatist from Australia. The irony is that Doug is calling for an end to dogma and an engagement with feminism and other issues that Marxism has historically not engaged with successfully while he still shows signs of adhering to his own "productivist" understanding of Marxism. Doug stubbornly defends Judith Butler's pomo feminism while openly reviling Vandana Shiva. In essence, however, both Butler and Shiva are making critiques of Marxism's that reject the very unidimensionality that all of us--except Heartfield--find so repugnant. My "stubborn defense" of Butler amounts to taking her seriously and learning from her. I find her lack of interest in political economy and class deeply frustrating, since any investigation of how subjects are produced and reproduced has to take these into consideration. This is a blindness at least as significant as classical Marxism's towards gender - though Butler is about 400 times smarter and more interesting than Chris Warren. My problem with Shiva is her gender essentialism, her romanticism about India's pre-colonial past, her hypocrisy in leading a very cosmopolitan life while recommending that everyone else stay at home, and a very un-nuanced rejection of technology. Just because Monsanto is using biotech to screw peasants around the world doesn't mean that biotech itself is always and everywhere a sinister plot by white imperialist men. Doug
Re: M-I: Mythologising Native Americans
The unlikely question of whether the north American tribes or the Zemstvos represent missed opportunity is surely a laughably academic one - unless of course Proyect is suggesting that we go back to that stage, before going forward again to socialism: the most extreme version of the theory of 'stages of development' one could imagine. Fraternally -- James Heartfield Actually my interest in these questions precedes and transcends Heartfield's Marxist-tinged libertarian intervention on the Internet. They were provoked by a Conference on Globalization at the Riverside Church several years ago which featured Jerry Mander, Kirkpatrick Sale and Vandana Shiva as keynote speakers. They all advocated bioregionalism with American Indians, Quakers, subsistence farmers, etc. as models. All 3 keynote speakers were deeply hostile to technology and Sale has defended the Unabomber recently. In his public lectures, he starts off by smashing a personal computer. I challenged Sale in the discussion period at this conference. I said that it is one thing to defend the people living in the Amazon rainforest--and unlike LM, we should--but it is another thing to tell the millions of people living in the 'favelas' of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo to go live there themselves. That is the logic of Sale's position and it is demented. I hadn't thought much about these questions until Heartfield showed up on the Marxism-Thaxis mailing-list and began defending some really nutty positions in highly polished prose filled with quotes from Marx. What's up with that, I said to myself. So I browsed through his group's archives and discovered an obnoxious attack on Survival International. This human rights group had come to the defense of the Yanomami people who were facing genocide. Now Heartfield is too clever to come out and say that the Yanomami should just disappear, it is much more Machiavellian to simply heap abuse on the front-line defenders of the South American Indians. My plans are to put a stake through the heart of this "productivist" version of Marxism that could permit apologetics on behalf of genocide. It is not just Heartfield's gang. The American RCP had a debate with Russell Means and Ward Churchill at the Pine Ridge reservation that is contained in Churchill's collection "Marxism and Native Americans" that Robin Hahnel referred to. It makes all the same arguments but with a Maoist rather than a left-libertarian inflection. This is the 150th anniversery of the Communist Manifesto. Mike Albert's attack on the Manifesto has been circulating on the Internet and is the subject of an intense debate on Marxism-International between Doug Henwood and Chris Warren, a dogmatist from Australia. The irony is that Doug is calling for an end to dogma and an engagement with feminism and other issues that Marxism has historically not engaged with successfully while he still shows signs of adhering to his own "productivist" understanding of Marxism. Doug stubbornly defends Judith Butler's pomo feminism while openly reviling Vandana Shiva. In essence, however, both Butler and Shiva are making critiques of Marxism's that reject the very unidimensionality that all of us--except Heartfield--find so repugnant. Old intellectual habits are hard to break. Marx was even older than me--believe it or not--when he came to the conclusion that the Russian populists were right and that he was wrong. In the Second Edition of Capital, he had derided them. After reading them with an open mind, he turned around and said that the accumulation model of V. 1 of Capital was not universal. It's too bad that he wasn't immortal, isn't it. He could be called upon to arbitrate all these disputes. Well, he may have died but it is incumbent upon us--or at least those of us who consider ourselves Marxist--to follow his example. Never stop criticizing our own ideas, never stop looking at the material conditions of life, never stop identifying with the oppressed. In my postings on the American Indians, I plan to try to come up with a synthesis of the critique advanced by the "indigenists" and Marxism itself. As I have already stated, my guidelines will be the work of Marx on the Russian questions and Mariategui on the Peruvian class/indigenous peoples struggles. This is the agenda: 1) Wounded Knee: how the struggle to re-ratify an 1868 treaty shook American capitalism 2) Russell Means, Ward Churchill versus Maoist dogmatism 3) American Indians and energy reserves 4) American Indians and ecology 5) A critique of Jerry Mander 6) Mariategui's Marxism 7) A Communist Manifesto for the next millenium Louis Proyect
Re: Mythologising Native Americans
Michael Eisenscher wrote: Last question: For those who are tempted to romanticize the lives of Amazonian indians or the simplicity of rural life, how many currently have adopted anything approaching that kind of lifestyle? From Yahoo! 411: Jerry Anica ManderBolinas,CA 94924 Kirkpat Faith Sale113 W 11th St #1, New York,NY 10011-8325 Doug
Re: Mythologising native Americans
Heartfield: What I was saying was that the 100 000 Pennsylvania Dutch who squatted land in the eighteenth century after escaping indentured servitude could not be described as capitalists or landlords. There are many landless peasants who are invading the Yanomami Amazon rainforest homeland today. They are not capitalists, but the land they are invading belongs to somebody else. That was also true of 19th century America. The only way one can excuse such land-theft is on the basis of some kind of mad marriage between Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. The Indians were one rung lower on the evolutionary scale, like dinosaurs, and had to make way for a fitter species. Unfortunately, there are aspects of Marx's writings that support this interpretation--I suppose that LM keeps a database of them for handy reference--but this does not make it right. The Boer farmers were fleeing British oppression in South Africa but this did not give them the right to throw black people off their tribal lands and herd them into Bantustans. The South African apartheid state and the USA have an identical racist history as settler states. The reason that South Africa loomed more evil in the 1970s and 80s was because there were 9 blacks for every one white and the injustice was hard to ignore. In the USA, there are less than a million Indians--thanks to the cavalry and smallpox--therefore, sweeping them under the rug requires less effort. But make no mistake, the Black Hills of the Dakotas belong to the Lakota people and not the mining companies who are despoiling them. As a rule of thumb, I would expect justice for American Indians not to take the shape of evicting millions of ordinary people from highly populated areas that used to belong to the Indians. Who in god's name would want to reclaim Cleveland, Ohio any how. In a discussion with a puerile white student in Cleveland, Ward Churchill found himself trying to justify the land-claims of Indians. The student argued, "We knew what to do with the land--unlike you Indians--so we deserve it." Churchill drily replied, "Yes, after you got done with it, the Cayuhoga River caught fire whenever you threw a match into it--no Indians could ever manage this." Let the white people keep Cleveland, etc. but there are millions and millions of acres of this country that are like Canada's. They remain unspoiled, underpopulated and relatively pristine except for the mining, oil and timber companies who are "developing" them commercially. I suspect that the 1868 Laramie treaty that turned control of the Black Hills to the Lakota is a prime example of what a socialist America would move rapidly to re-ratify. Every god-damned uranium mining company would be shut down for good and these sacred hills would be returned to the Lakotas. So no, I don't want to see America depopulated and handed back to the native Americans. I would rather see all of its occupants enjoy equal rights, with land, like any other means of production in common ownership. Nice rhetoric. However, the left should support concrete demands such as that raised by the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee that the 1868 Laramie treaty be respected. It is this demand coupled with respect for fishing rights in various places from Minnesota to Washington State, etc. that genuine socialist politics is grounded in. Your support of equal rights, etc. sounds like the sort of cheap campaign pledges made by a typical bourgeois candidate. Louis Proyect
Mythologising native Americans
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Mark Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes The slave-plantation system was not only integrated into the world circuits of proto-capitalism and then early industrial capitalism, it was at the heart of so-called 'primitive accumulation'. There is a wealth of research by now which shows that slavery was not some subordinate mode of production but was often the best-organised most highly-capitalised branch of capitalism. Well, I don't want to get into a semantic debate about what is and what is not capitaism, but I was guided first by Marx on the Civil War, who characterises it as a war between two systems, and second by Jairus Banaji (Capital and Class #3, 'modes of production debate in a materialist conception of history) who characterises the plantation system as 'capitalist enterprises of patriarchal and feudal character, producing absolute surplus value on the basis of slave labour and a monopoly in land'. The point here is that by no means could exploitation on the basis of unfree labour be considered as typical of capitalism, unless the meaning of capital is to be expanded beyond all usefulness. I can happily agree that slavery played a key role for capitalism, as the importance of slave grown cotton for the English cotton spinners shows. However, it seems doubtful that the plantations were the best-organised most highly-capitalised branch of capitalism Since the low value of workers militated against their replacement by machinery, and the open coercion of slave labour militated against skilled work that is associated with machinery, and indeed against good organisation. Heartfield: But the second dynamic West, principally in the North West, was far from being reactionary or indeed capitalistically inspired. Indeed the settlers in the North West who were driving the frontier on, were immigrants from Europe who were fleeing reaction in Europe, as well as the power of the capitalist class on the Eastern seaboard. This is just as silly. Where on earth did these immigrants come from? From what were they fleeing? At this time, before 1850, they were primarily English, Scottish or north European, and the Irish were beginning to arrive. Why? Ever hear of the Enclosure Movement, the Highland Clearances, the potato Famine, James? Do yoususpect these events were in some way connected to the rise of industrial capitalism? Even before that, emigration from Europe was drivenm by the market forces of proto-capitalism and the growth of the reserve army of labour. I'm really not sure what your point is. I certainly never meant to say that these immigrants were not fleeing from European capitalism. What I was saying was that the 100 000 Pennsylvania Dutch who squatted land in the eighteenth century after escaping indentured servitude could not be described as capitalists or landlords. Nor could the one million Germans who colonised the mid West between 1830 and 1850. Many of these were fleeing the defeat of the German revolution, and they took with them a love of liberty and a fierce spirit of independence: they were no capitalist stooges. These settlers were independent farmers who had gone West to avoid the monopoly power of the Eastern elite. Read: they were driven west thru a porous frontier to avoid being proletarianised. Yes they were persecuted, but they were not simply 'driven'. That is to deny the positive spirit of the settler movement and to reduce these real historical actors to hopeless patsies, which they were not. This is progressive in the same way that everything in capitalism is progressive according to Heartfield: the truth is that large numbers of people were being hounded from one end of the world to the other, and forced to commit atrocities against each other, in the service of and at the mercy of gigantic unfolding forces of world capitalism. There is something Orwellian about Heartfield's inversions. What is Orwellian is the way that you turn opponents of the East Coast establishment into mindless automatons of capitalism. When the US government ceded territories to Indian tribes in the many broken treaties, it was not a sop to those native Americans, it was a deliberate attempt to frustrate the Eastward expansion and its populist influence on US politics. Yes, the Eastern patricians wanted to depress the value of labour-power and had 2 ways to do it: close the frontier in the east or close the frontier in the west, which is what they did in the end. Well I suppose I should be grateful that you understand the relationship between land monopoly and wages. Ground up in the class struggle between proletarians and capitalists in the East, the Indian Nations were faced with one future only: annihilation, either by new incomers AGAINST their easternm masters, or by incomers AT THE BEHEST of eastern capital once it became clear that there were more profits possible from opening the forntier than closing it. For all the rhetorical
Re: Mythologising Native Americans
At 10:09 AM 1/5/98 -0800, Michael Eisenscher wrote, in response to Louis Proyect questioning the accuracy of the "rural idiocy" phrase: Second question: Is our objection as critics of capitalism (and dare I say, proponents of socialism) to urbanization per se or to capitalism and its consequences under circumstances of urbanization? Should we celebrate (romanticize) rural life for its own sake, ignoring the intellectually and culturally stultifying charateristics of rural life under conditions of capitalism and it predecessors? The perception of "rural idiocy" is probably an urban myth. The Russian economist A.V. Chayanov (_The Theory of Peasant Economy_, Madison: The U. of Wisconsin Press, 1986) condicted empirical studies of Russian peasantry before the Revolution and concluded that their system was more sustananle than that proposed by Stalin's reformers. A big part of that sustainability was the autonomous control of the means of production and work by the producers (the peasant household) - which allowed great flexibility in adjusting to outside conditions. From that standpoint, the peasant farmer can be described as a decision-making entrepreneur - by contrast to most urban-style employment (blue and white collar alike) which is largely mindless following the rules. The superstition and stupidity of peasantry might be the product of literary fiction fed to Western urban audiences (cf. _The Painted Bird_ by J. Kosinski). Ethnographic accounts of pre-industrial societies show otherwise. For example, Malinowski's ethnographic work on Triobriand Island clearly shows that magic has definite function -- as a ritualistic control of the environmemnt that beyond control given the level of technology. Malinowski contrasts lagoon fishing (a fairly predictable and controllable operation) and deep-sea fishing (highly risky and unpredictable) and notes that while the latter is surrounded by a host of magic rituals, such rituals are absent from lagoon fishing. he concludes that magic serves as a symbolic substitute for technology. Claude Levi-Strauss (_The Savage Mind_) argues that the "primitive" people were capable of producing classification systems as sophisticated as those found in "advanced" sciences - yet based on a different logic that that found in European thought. Noam Chomsky argues along similar lines pointing that the universal human ability to master a language, the most complex system of expression known, suggests that all people have essentially the same cognitive capacity, regardless of their social class or origins. Of course, modern urban organizations do precisely the same thing -- magic rituals (aka emergency plans, risk management, etc.) to deal with situations the management cannot predict or fully control. This is what Dilbert cartoons are all about, although my favorite example is the continegncy plan prepared by the US Postal Service how to deliver mail after a nuclear attack on the US. The bottom line is that "idiocy" lies not in urban or rural society per se, but in the relative level of decision-making autonomy people have in their everyday lives. By this criterion, the TV-driven American society with taylorised workplaces relegating the solution of minute everday life problems to some form of authority - might be the highest form of idiocy yet known. wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
