"While I agree that the capitalist system needed to eliminate feudalism and slavery," wrote Halpern, "I don’t feel that what Novack called the ‘Genocide of the Indians’ was in any way progressive."

In his letter, Halpern confuses two points, both discussed in Novack’s book. One is the scientific truth explained by Marxism that each successive stage in the development of human society marked a progressive advance for humanity. In each, steps forward in the mode of production as a result of the collective labor of human beings raised the conditions of life, cultural level, and mastery of nature. Each stage in human progress--from savagery to barbarism, to slave societies, to feudalism, and to capitalism--swept away old social orders. Despite possible romantic notions about primitive communism, or life in tribal or feudal societies, those looking back to previous epochs of human development rarely want to return to the realities of life in the old society.

The other point relates to the brutal methods that the new ruling classes often use to consolidate and expand the new social order. Novack explains the historically progressive spread of capitalist social relations from coast to coast in the United States, while at the same time condemning the brutal extermination of the Native American population by which this was accomplished. There is a difference between sweeping away precapitalist encumbrances such as tribalism, and a genocidal war, which is what the capitalists ended up carrying out for reasons described by Novack. Similarly, explaining that slavery needed to be swept away does not mean one is calling for killing all the slaves.

The social and economic relations that predominated in Indian tribal society on the one hand, and those imported from Europe by the settler-capitalists on the other, were antagonistic and mutually exclusive. "Regardless of their wishes," wrote Novack in the same book, "the Indians and Europeans were sharply counterposed to each other by virtue of their contradictory economic needs and aims. The Indians could maintain their economy, with its primitive communist institutions and customs, its crude division of labor between the sexes, and its tribal ties of blood kinship, only by keeping the white man at bay. The newcomers could plant their settlements and expand their economic activities only by pressing upon the Indian tribes and snatching their territories."

Land stood at the center of the conflict. The settlers coveted it for commercial agriculture, forestry, construction of settlements, and commerce and manufacture. For their part, the Indians viewed the land as a common resource. To them, its sale, trade, and rent were completely foreign ideas.

"The roster of massacres of Indian men, women, and children extends from the Great Swamp Massacre of 1696 in Rhode Island...to the final dreadful spectacle of Wounded Knee in the year 1890," recorded one historian quoted by Novack.

Far from endorsing such methods or anointing them as "progressive," socialist workers and young socialists identify with the Indian peoples and leaders who staged heroic and frequently effective resistance to the onslaught. At the same time, we point out the "most revolutionary part"--to use the words of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto--played by the rising capitalist class in transforming social and economic relations.

Such bloody methods were as typical of capitalism in its revolutionary period as they are in today’s imperialist epoch, when the capitalist system is a brake on further social progress. The steps forward under capitalist leadership, including the Industrial Revolution, which vastly expanded the productive capacities of society, have been brought about at immense cost to the human beings who stood in the way or who were recruited into the industrial and military armies of the bourgeoisie.

In America’s Revolutionary Heritage, Novack explained that the most important contribution of the capitalists is the creation of their own gravediggers, the industrial proletariat--the only truly revolutionary class in modern society. The capitalist rulers, he wrote, "are destined to be dislodged from within.... This job will be done by social forces generated under their own system and provoked by their own reactionary rule. Not least among these forces will be the descendants of the red, black, and brown peoples which were subjugated by the bourgeois property owners on their way to supreme power."  
 
 
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