Posted
on Apr 30, 2012
By Chris Hedges
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let
the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil
and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life.
Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into
extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism,
accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft.
Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s
pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the
naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians,
including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they
campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “[A]t times when the page is
turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History
brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the
whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of
empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is
modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less
and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a
collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the
self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who
entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that
will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of
intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates
that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a
mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our
march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are
reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of
“primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and
mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected
the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight
to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern
beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal
life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not
be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the
self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the
allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we
must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged
by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but
a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and
hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands
of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The
Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from
Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about
the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of
numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane
details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were]
owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by
their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in
large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “…
reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.”
Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the
union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s
vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of
the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and
cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something
essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction
of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens,
where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx
noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a
voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active
participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to
express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election.
Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action
among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no
equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based
on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival
as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our
dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy
Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty
including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate
the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or
separate from nature.
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