Word: pattersons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Patterson freely admits, though, that many Marxists as well as conservatives may find the book disappointing. For while it proclaims the ideal of a "humanistic socialism" and dismisses the world-view of crude Marxist determinists who defer to future revolution, it never really grapples with the question of how structural reorganization of modern societies can otherwise take place. Patterson says he views this problem as the topic for another book, and that in taking on this next project he plans to bring to bear what he is learning as a special adviser to Michael Manley's socialist regime in Jamaica...
...these vituperative attacks on the dangerous and dysfunctional elements of ethnic chauvinism, Patterson has as much in mind the difficult road ahead for the developing Third World nations as the reactionary pettiness of the current neo-ethnicity movement in the U.S. And he concludes that if the modern world is to see any lasting structural social change toward a more egalitarian world order, it must transcend this historically cyclical pattern of "ethnic revivalism...
...Patterson is long on criticism of ethnicity in its many guiss, he comes up a bit short on substantive solutions to the problems for which it has traditionally served as an answer. Throughout the book he espouses the alternative of a new individualist universalism, envisioning a world in which people respect each other's differences, appreciate each other's individual talents, and come together no longer in "ethnic" but in existential solidarity...
...these philosophical abstractions were the only alternative to ethnic identification that Patterson offered, it could easily be argued that he commits the same error for which he attacks the ethnicity advocates--naively embracing an ideal while ignoring the structural social constraints that keep most of the world's people from realizing...
...Third World developing countries that transcendental nationalism, while a necessary credo in the process of bourgeois decolonization, shares with other forms of ethnic identification the inherent potential for reaction--that what it has given them with one hand it can take with the other. As models for progressive nationalism, Patterson singles out the current movements in Tanzania and Angola, both of which he praises for taking strong anti-ethnic stances and for downplaying mystical nationalist appeals in favor of symbolism directly related to work and to the land, to the immediate tasks of building a prosperous society...