Let's say you're the leader of a primarily indigenous country where most people are peasants who sustain themselves through the practice of subsistence agriculture, like Peru or Bolivia. Let's say you want to develop the country's economy in the way development is traditionally conceived of. This involves the creation of a modern industrial economy at the expense of the indigenous peasant's traditional ways of life. Would you say that by doing this, you would be oppressing them to an extent that is unacceptable? If so, what is the correct vision to have for the future if you're in a country like that?
I'd say it depends on their standard of living under the current system. If their cultural traditions essentially resign entire populations to living in poverty, are they worth preserving? How exacting does a culture have to be, if it can't survive thousands, perhaps millions of people changing their lifestyle, but still living in proximity and being granted the freedom to practice as they wish?
Or just build the city over the hill and leave the door unlocked for them idk
How exacting does a culture have to be, if it can’t survive thousands, perhaps millions of people changing their lifestyle,
People living in premodern conditions typically consider "the lifestyle" and the institutions that surround it to be an integral part of the culture. Leftist types often follow this line because they consider those people's experiences to be the most legitimate.
Or just build the city over the hill and leave the door unlocked for them idk
Do you think that is possible?
It seems to me like China developed a modern industrial economy at the expense of the indigenous peasant’s traditional ways of life. Should I count this answer as a simple no on the first question?
The way I see it it really doesn't matter if it's better or worse for it to be the way I described it. I'm trying to use language as morally neutral as possible so as to not goad people into answering a certain way.
Would you say that if I read Mao, it would disabuse me of the notion I have that China has a traditionally Marxist idea of development where advancing society to the next stage of development at the expense of the institutions of the earlier stage of development is seen as a goal?
Cuba was embargoed and couldn't industrialize though - what they were able to do was definitely good but a lot of the issues they had after the fall of the USSR would have likely been avoided if they could have.
Definitely - I don't think we're going to be able to make it through ecological crisis with development.
This involves the creation of a modern industrial economy at the expense of the indigenous peasant’s traditional ways of life. Would you say that by doing this, you would be oppressing them to an extent that is unacceptable?
The issue is peasants don't give a shit about communism, they just till their crops and live in an Amish Paradise or whatever.
I don't recall the words Marx used exactly on this subject, but capitalism is a world-historical force because it creates the proletariat, who have a class interest in the formation of communist society; it's a stage of development humanity must go through. The issue is peasants don't give a shit about communism, they just till their crops and live in an Amish Paradise or whatever.
The two closest articles I could find was Engels on the Mexican-American war:
spoiler
Will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a "war of conquest", which, although it deals with a severe blow to his theory based on "justice and humanity", was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization, and for the third time in history give the world trade a new direction? The "independence" of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in someplaces "justice" and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?
Or Marx on British rule in India:
spoiler
Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.
We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all.
We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan.
We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
I don't have the time to give further background on this quote, though I agree with organic_party's short comments in this thread that Marx is coldly analyzing the conditions for the communist movement, and that his assessment of India as backwards is because pre-capitalist civilizations are literally economically backwards. (People often forget pre-capitalist cultures also do horrific shit like human sacrifice and FGM.) Progress is sometimes horrific, but it is progress nonetheless.
Dude, why would it be any different from the industrialization of anywhere else? Yeah, a lot of people would migrate to the cities cuz there are better paying jobs there and that would affect them, but you wouldn't be forcing them, unless you are a dickhead.
Also, you might be overestimating the "peasant" population proportion of those countries.
Would you say that by doing this, you would be oppressing them
I wouldn't say it's that word. But that doesn't mean it's good stuff.
