Very simply 
! Though true – it would have required a radically different evolution of Western socioeconomics.
In other words, postulating that Europe happened to be inhabited by a race of altruistic saints.
Nope. Only that the peasant revolts, indigenous resistance, diggers, levellers, luddites, and more had been successful. Capitalism evolved through such struggles and was not inevitable or preordained. I admit, betting in the side with more firepower or pike power is the safe bet, but many other possibilities existed and exist today.
Rather than TINa, There Is [was] No Alternative, the reality has always been “there is an alternative, many alternatives, really interesting alternatives,” or TIA MARIA. Bottoms up!
Now that would have been a cool painting.
That’s less clear, doubtless due to the low level of detail: Assuming that’s a setting sun, the native is riding south, not west, and neither the native nor the farmer have any facial expression.
Though it has plenty of other issues. Like the horse having two front right legs and no front left leg. And the native being, apparently, naked, blond, and pale-skinned. And the whatever-the-heck that brown thing is supposed to be, left of the farmer. And three different years on the flag… I guess one is when colonization started and one is when it became a state, but what’s the third? And, of course, all of the standard issues with a flag that’s just a seal on a blue background.
Modern Western farmers are, indeed, incorporating bison into agriculture. They’re quite tasty, like beef only more so.
One thing I think is notable, looking at it now, is that the Indians in the foreground running away have a bow, a spear and a tomahawk hatchet (and horses). While the Indians in the background dancing around their teepees don’t seem to be going anywhere.
Not that I dispute the main reading everyone else has on this painting. But I wonder if the artist was saying something like “the violent, raiding warrior braves are bad and must be driven out, but the ‘civilized’, peaceful Indians are fine, and part of our shared future”. Still racist, but maybe with a more sympathetic slant than it first seems?
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
They are “peacefully” staying in their place in the Reservation, in the background, to one side. The ones out in front roaming the plains freely are driven out.
That different societies have created very different cultures and economies is sufficient evidence to hold that there is no single universal human nature and that our actions and behaviours reflect, to some degree, the society and economy we are in. Thus Gast’s painting is indeed a telling reflection on a particular economic and social formation much like the one we are in today. That Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a comment on the failure of Bolshevism as it came to resemble the capitalism it had hoped to replace did not mean he had given up hope or his socialist ideas and ideals, as he himself noted.
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State points to the similarities between the Bolshevik project and the contemporary capitalism it drew on.
But the important point is simply Gast and his patron expressed a particular take on American settler colonialism and the capitalism that fueled it, and that take carried a lot of assumptions about civilization, race, and progress that are still around today. Many believe these assumptions and positions are harmful and may be challenged and resisted, when examined in their historical context and in the present.
That reads to me awfully like 'because you were wrong about X I’m entitled to ignore the fact that you’re right about Y."
In other words, I don’t see that the facts that, for a variety of reasons, many American workers didn’t get jobs as coders and some people argued that they all could have, has anything whatsoever to do with the treatment by the US government and/or citizens of the American native tribes.
There’s a couple of such places near me.
Bison meat needs different cooking techniques than most beef, or you may not be able to chew the results. The flavor is indeed quite good. (Both of those pieces of info from personal experience.)
X = Y when the approved solution is “fuck ‘em, let them die.”
That’s how General Sherman thought then, and it’s how Private Equity managers think today
While human culture is certainly malleable, I think it a mistake to presume that it’s limitlessly malleable. And my guess is that the ideal of Marxism, that people will selflessly give of themselves with no thought of direct quid pro quo, out of a love for humanity in the abstract millions of anonymous strangers, is outside the envelope of what any culture could inculcate.
History isn’t about what might have happened but what did happen.
If you want change work for it in the present. You can use what might have happened as a guide for creating what will happen. But inventing a new history that’s more pleasant to your sensibilities always has negative outcomes.
And since you ignored my “virtually” before, note that I’m not using it here. When I say always, I mean always.
So that’s why you think you don’t have to listen to people saying it shouldn’t be so?
Still doesn’t seem to me to follow.
“I’m running up debits now in real time, but rather than address them, I want credit for my scorn for long-past debits incurred by people who are now dead.” Bullshit.
But the situation may resolve itself: in a few years the Oglala Aquifer will run dry, and the Sioux and Comanche will have the Plains to themselves again.
In the meantime, how would a Two-State Solution be realistically implemented? What would Hawaiian sovereignty look like? Etc. etc.
There are still a shitload of living people being affected.
What you think of those who are pointing this out may be a separate issue. But your scorn for them doesn’t make the problem disappear.
Sorry for the delayed reply, but I spent the time going through the 50 volumes of Marx and Engels Collected Works and a number of Marx-adjacent writers and could find no such notion presented anywhere as an ideal of Marxism. Seriously. And I read this stuff as part of what I do for a living.
As for Exapno’s comment, 3 comments. First, history is more often what historians say happened, and they are formed by their societies like everyone else. Second, we can find all sorts of examples of oppositional movements, resistance, and struggles. Those conflicts did much to shape the present. Third, the “winners” may have won but that does not mean the “losers” do not have a great deal to teach us about the past, the present, and the future. For a quick discussion of this, see the preface to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
What does this have to do with Gast? Only that he was commissioned to paint a particular take on US history, he did it, it is a very partial (in both senses) view, and that the Indian Wars that continued until 1924 are some evidence that it was a contested process.
Ignorance fought then; but surely it’s true that many people have taken that to be what Marx was advocating? Most especially the Bolsheviks who expected the proletariat to work for decades for almost nothing but to live one more day and that someday things would be better?
Moderating:
We’ve had a few sidetracks going on, and after consulting with the original poster, who considers their question answered, I’m going to allow the ongoing discussion including minor hijacks to promote the discussion of intent of the artist, and relevant discussion on the changing ideology. Otherwise, normal P&E rules apply, so please keep the discussion adjacent.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I was referring to “alternate histories,” of the sort that try to make the case that if we had only done things their way the world would be might brighter today. Those which point out that any change in history may have left the world as a worse hellhole than the present comprise a very small sub-genre, even though they are equally likely.
Real history includes all sides, all perspectives, all records. “Winners” may try to scrub history of alternate viewpoints but as the profession today shows, histories of the “losers” can be pieced together with hard work. I wrote that using all history to make decisions about future actions is the proper course; substituting your preferred one to obliterate the rest never works.