[Xmca-l] Re: As of 2020, the American Century is Over

[White, Phillip]

following up on Martin's comments, the distortion of human development is not an effect from the cause of capitalism.  that's an awkward beginning, but what i mean to say is that the undeniable reality of the distortion of human development is not directly caused by capitalism.  i think that we're using newtonian physics of cause and effect to explain this all to common human affliction, wherein within all human relationships, there is also the distortion of human development. i think that what we're really looking at here is a core human culturally constructed condition that endures regardless of socio-cultural constraints.

to provide some support for this assertion i refer to the historian Pekka Hamalainen, author of Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008).  Hamalainen describes a culture that in time produced a markedly pronounced distortion of human development.



In what we now refer to as North American, in particular the southern great plains that border the east of the Rocky Mountains, from the early  1700’s to the mid 1800’s the Comanches built an empire that “eclipsed” and “subsumed” the Euro-American colonies.  In doing so the Comanches modified their culture from one of nomadic-hunter gatherers, to a dual economy of hunting and pastoralism of labor division where women specialized in food and hide production, boys in animal herding, and adult men in raiding, hunting and trading.  An exchange economy developed based on a horse-bison-grass production in trade for vegetables and cereal grains as well as European guns, gunpowder and metals. In time they had a large-scale slave economy to support their market economy.  Though living in groups of small bands, they gathered yearly for inclusive political meetings; regional divisions were formed and met periodically. Leadership coordinated trade and diplomacy, built consensus around treaties, military operations, and coordinate responses to the interference of European-American state powers. They forced the Apaches out of the Great Plains. They created a social network that incorporated junior allies, slaves, adopted kinfolks, and naturalized Comanches. In order to trade and negotiate relationships, “distant people spoke their language and emulated their economic innovations and lifestyles, their norms of war, peace, violence, exchange and retribution.  The resource Comanches needed most was labor to maintain their herds of horses, which led to slaving frontiers of Apacheria, New Mexico, Texas, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Durango, Zapatecas, and San Luis Potosi.  Within their own culture, the Comanches developed a society of ranked hierarchy where men amassed material possessions of horses and slaves to increase family wealth.  Personal prestige and political power was exercised through gift giving and advantageous marriages. Powerful chiefs became obese. For young men, often the means to gain enough material possession in order to marry was through the participation in war parties. They became skilled horse breeders, developed for warfare, hunting and hauling. They recognized at least seventeen types of horses based on color alone. This was all accompanied with ecological degradation due the large population of horses.


my two bits.


phillip

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