Continuing my daily bulletin against the Kulak class, I note that organic farming is responsible for eight per cent of all E-Coli cases in the US, while contributing just one per cent of the US food market. Unlike GM food, E-Coli is a proven killer.
In message <199908130720.QAA29303 at violet.sun-net.ne.jp>, Brian Small
<bjsmalld at sun-net.ne.jp> writes
>
>Jim Heartfield wrote something about the farmer not getting his products
>sold due to the good will of consumers. Bankers and Plumbers buy the
>cheapest goods available and he doesn't care if farmers enjoy producing
>our food.
I was paraphrasing (and reversing) Adam Smith 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own self-interest.' (Wealth of Nations, Penguin Classics, 119).
>How do you go about socializing the world market if you don't expect
>people to care about each other's working conditions?
>
>Maybe Jim Heartfield is underestimating people.
>
I'm confident that people do care about each others working conditions, but not when they're in the supermarket. Consumer boycotts are a predominantly middle class form of protest, full of all of the mixed political judgements that you expect of them. Organic food makes up just one percentage point of food sold in the United States. I think it is pretty clear what class it is that constitutes its market. For those of us whose wages do not allow self-actualisation in consumer choice, it's still a question of going down to 'pick up the rations', as my mother would say.
>Anybody know the title of that book Upton Sinclair wrote a couple years
>after _The Jungle_ . That book triggered a big outcry and led to some
>reofrms.
Reflecting on the storm over the Jungle, Sinclair wrote that he was primarily moved by the condition of the workers, not the meat: 'I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. I am supposed to have helped clean up the yards and improve the country's meat supply - though this is mostly delusion. But nobody even pretends that I improved the condition of the stockyard workers.' (Kolko, p103&7). Economic Historian Gabriel Kolko explained 'The reality of the matter, of course, is that the big packers were warm friends of regulation, especially when it primarily affected their innumerable small competitors.' (p107)
In message <37B35DEF.99FB514A at ecst.csuchico.edu>, Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> writes
>I suppose that he could say that the ability of the large farmers to get
>subsidised water, better access to government (in addition to) private
>credit and the like all represent a form of efficiency. In that case,
>financial difficulty is proof of inefficiency -- just as lower wages for
>blacks and women is proof of their inferiority as workers. I have a
>problem in believing market outcomes represent some sort of absolute
>indication of efficiency.
I find it hard to associate farmers with oppressed minorities. Maybe it is a national difference, but farmers in England have generally been the most reactionary section of the population. 'Businessmen in boots', and the backbone of the Tory vote. I think it must be right to say also that farmers in America today are the benefactors of the great shake-out in the 30s that annihilated the truck farmers, leading to the dispossession and internal migration of more than a million black truck farmers from the rural South to the northern cities. -- Jim heartfield