Haunani-Kay Trask : CONTEXT QUESTION 5 : What is the place of revolutionary struggle in the American context?

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Transcript

The idea that ideas are critical to life is profoundly European. Americans are into the practicality of ideas - "If it works, do it!" That's where that stupid, stupid phrase, "If it works…" It's such a stupid phrase, but that's the American thing.

You know, Gramsci(1) has this whole section, never having been to the United States, on Fordism(2) and the mechanization of life. Well, that's Americans. They invented all of this! 

Know-how!

Gadgetry!

Who could possibly identify with the revolutionary spirit in America? There isn't one! It's the national bourgeoisie that go around killing Indians! Who wants to identify with that??

Notes

(1) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): Italian revolutionary, Marxist theorist, and general secretary of the Communist Party in Italy (from 1924 until 1928, the date of his arrest and life-imprisonment). While in prison Gramsci wrote extensively on history, education, philosophy, politics, the state and civil society, Marxism, and Americanism. These writings have been published as Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s original contributions include the concept of “organic intellectuals” and their role in revolutionizing society, and the concept of hegemony, both political and cultural, as reflected in cultural and political domination.

(2) Fordism: Gramsci’s characterization of American methods of mass production, symptomatic of the beginning of a new stage in history. Gramsci predicted a broad range of (often contradictory) complications that would arise from the radical changes to the socio-economic conditions already evident in American society - intensified economic exploitation of the working class, increasingly complex forms of cultural and physio-sexual repression, the development of repressive social structures, and so on.

Excerpt from The New World Order.

...the history of the modern period is the history of increasing conformity, paid for in genocide and ecocide. The more we are made to be the same, the more the environment we inhabit becomes the same: "backward" people forced into a "modern" (read "industrial") context can no longer care for their environment. As the people are transformed, or more likely, exterminated, their environment is progressively degraded, parts of it destroyed forever. Physical despoliation is reflected in cultural degradation. A dead land is preceded by a dying people. As an example, indigenous languages replaced by "universal" (read "colonial") languages result in the creation of "dead languages." But what is "dead" or "lost" is not the language but the people who once spoke it and transmitted their mother tongue to succeeding generations. Lost, too, is the relationship between words and their physical referents. In Hawaiʻi, English is the dominant language, but it cannot begin to encompass the physical beauty of our islands in the unparalleled detail of the Hawaiian language. Nor can English reveal how we knew animals to be our family; how we harnessed the ocean's rhythms, creating massive fishponds; how we came to know the migrations of deep-ocean fish and golden plovers from the Arctic; how we sailed from hemisphere to hemisphere with nothing but the stars to guide us. English is foreign to Hawaiʻi; it reveals nothing of our place where we were born, where our ancestors created knowledge now "lost" to the past.

The secrets of the land die with the people of the land. This is the bitter lesson of the modern age. Forcing human groups to be alike results in the destruction of languages, of environments, of nations.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi,  revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. pages 59-60.)