In his April 1970 introduction, Novack points out that his aim is not so much to tell what happened in the conquest of native peoples—many historians have done so—but why. “I have used the Marxist method of historical materialism to answer this key question,” he says. “What was involved was the collision of two disparate levels of historical development, two fundamentally different socioeconomic formations, two irreconcilable modes of life, types of cultures and outlooks upon the world. The defeat of the native tribes was predetermined by the incomparably greater powers of production and destruction, numbers, wealth, and organization, on the side of the classes composing bourgeois civilization.”

Commenting on Novack’s pamphlet (which is also included as chapter one in America’s Revolutionary Heritage by Novack), Halpern writes that “many of its conclusions continue to be true” and that “some things have changed.” But he fails to indicate which conclusions he thinks are no longer true and what has changed.

Halpern hints that these changes may be found in two books he recommends, which supposedly “give a clear documentation” of the genocide against the Native Americans and “expose the foundations of how property was acquired in this country.” Both describe in extensive detail the brutal conquest of the original inhabitants of the Americas. But these authors, like other bourgeois historians, are incapable of giving a scientific, class explanation of those events. Instead, they offer a liberal, idealist view.

For example, American Holocaust by David Stannard compares the massacres against Native Americans from the 15th through the 19th centuries with the imperialist government of Germany’s extermination campaign against the Jews under the Nazi regime in the 20th century—two completely different historical periods involving different class forces, causes, and results. Stannard argues that the cause of both phenomena lies in “the core of European thought and culture—Christianity.” This approach is similar to that of anarchist political commentator Noam Chomsky, who in his book Year 501: The Conquest Continues, rattles off an undifferentiated litany of horrors perpetrated by the ruling classes from the arrival of European settlers in the 1490s to the U.S.-led imperialist Gulf War in 1990-91, and even compares Christopher Columbus to Adolf Hitler. This is an ahistorical approach, to say the least. It does not even distinguish between the period when capitalism was revolutionary, and the epoch of imperialism, beginning in the 1890s, when capitalism reached its current stage—imperialism—and became a reactionary brake on progress.

Similarly, Halpern, in trying to highlight the accomplishments of Native Americans, seems to have a hard time explaining them accurately and historically. He marvels at the fact that in North America there were 500 Native American “nations” with “distinct cultures,” and that “much of the food we eat was developed by Native American farming techniques.” Novack lists many of these foods, and their numbers are impressive. But what Novack explains—and is missing in most other accounts—is the historical stages in which these developments took place. The indigenous inhabitants of this continent were in the early phases of developing agriculture, based on collective ownership of the land in a classless, stateless, egalitarian society in which women played the leading role. They produced only for subsistence. That society, representing the stage of primitive communism, collided with the qualitatively more developed productive capacities of capitalism, including farming techniques.

Halpern gets to the heart of his disagreement with Novack when he says that “the overall course of history is progressive” but then adds that “it is difficult to see the gains” for Native Americans. He even lends credence to the idea that “Native Americans might have had better lives before Columbus than they do today.” (Without citing a source, he attributes this view to Fidel Castro to give it authority). This approach substitutes moralizing for a materialist analysis.

The development of capitalist social relations worldwide in the 18th and 19th centuries was historically progressive. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels explained this in the Communist Manifesto, written in 1847-48. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years,” they wrote, “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” In the United States this led to two deep-going popular revolutions—one gained independence from British colonial rule and the second smashed slavery in the South.

The working class takes no responsibility for the barbaric methods of the capitalist class—including the genocide against the Indians—which working people will sweep away along with the system of capitalist rule itself when they take political power and transform society in the interests of the vast majority. Marx and Engels also explain that what the bourgeoisie “produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers”—the working class. In their fight for self-determination today, Native Americans, along with Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, will stand with workers and farmers in the front ranks of capitalism’s gravediggers.
 
 
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