Bush/revolution: theses on the challenges that gatherers and hunters pose to dominant structures

Abstract

This article argues that bush people deserve greater attention in revolutionary thought and action, both for the strategic value of their struggles against extraction at capital’s periphery and the emancipatory social values they continue to embody. But bush struggles cannot be borrowed for other purposes: the agenda of bush people for respect and cultural survival must respected in its own right.

Keywords:

• Mode of production
• gatherers and hunters
• bush
• revolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 U. Marx et al., Walter Benjamin’s Archive, 47.

2 Rousseau, Origins of Inequality; Engels, Origins of the Family; Marx, Ethnological Notebooks; Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance; Leacock and Lee Politics and History in Band Societies; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics.

3 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.

4 Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century.

5 Hardt and Negri, Empire; Butler, Gender Trouble.

6 Foster, Marx’s Ecology; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1.

7 Marx, Grundrisse; Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”; Marx, The Letters of Karl Marx.

8 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.

9 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 28.

10 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, 126.

11 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 258.

12 Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism.

13 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.

14 Livy, Early History of Rome.

15 Naian, Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh; Qian, First Emperor.

16 Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”; Lenin, What Is to Be Done.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Kulchyski

Peter Kulchyski is a full professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. He writes on northern Indigenous cultural politics, history and law, and is the author of numerous books including Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice (2018; University of Manitoba Press).