> The way I see it the left's problem with GM food is not really about GM
> food, but about the left.
>
> Genetic modification could be a good or a bad thing, depending on the
> use to which it was put. Doubtless if it was done recklessly, with real
> risk then that would be a bad thing, but what risks there are seem so
> wildly overstated that it is hard to find a convincing example of that.
Overstated risks in what sense, James? Risk of (mainly US) corporations world food supply? That's a very real risk - particularly given the agressiveness of US + European agricultural policy, and the long process of remoulding agriculture into a form more profitable form for the agribusiness giants (of which the former, as well as the organisation of scientific effort in the interest of profit, is part). The political implications of US + European world food supply shouldn't be ignored, imo.
Risk of frustrating land reform and rural development in countries like South Africa? Monsanto, on entering the South African scene, knows that its GM seeds, which are sold at a 'technology markup', are more expensive than non-GM varieties, and to make things worse, Monsanto contracts forbid seed re-use (or seed trade between farmers). This is going to aid the concentration of farming, make life more difficult for small (mostly black) farmers, and make vastly more difficult the kind of lifestyle which real land reform in South Africa could make possible - a kind of lifestyle where the rural proletariat have access to multiple sources of income (and thus some degree of independence), a step towards the breaking down of barriers between city and countryside that Marx spoke about.
>
> The left's accommodation to its own lowered horizons has led us to
> substitute the socialist critique of capitalism with the romantic
> critique of industrialisation. Where people once aspired to change the
> way society was, they find that programme less inspiring. By contrast
> the petit bourgeois reaction against industrial society is stronger than
> ever. Genetic modification is the acme of industrialisation, and
> provokes a middle class response from uncompetitive small-producers and
> consumers' lobbies.
GM is the acme of industrialisation, indeed - at least industrialisation in its form of Fordism, where all initiative is removed from the productive process and concentrated in the means of production. It seems, James, that your socialist roots are showing - roots in that socialism of Trotsky, Lenin and Kautsky where progress could be be measured in tons of steel and coal. Rather different, I think from Marx's vision of the 'liberation of all the senses'.
>
> The left, despairing of ever mobilising a working class reaction against
> capital has decided to make do with a middle class reaction against
> industry.
A reaction against industry - yes, a reaction against that industry which converts Kenyan land into cut flower plantations, which converts Ghanian rainforests into European toilet seats. James, you never seem to be very clear about who this 'middle class' is, but you're very happy to champion industry - that same industry which cheers on policies which strip countries like South Africa of an education budget, while at the same time deploying the products of years of education (in the form of high input agriculture) in the country.
Of course those arguments which focus on organic farming as salvation, at the expense of a critique of the system of commodity production and exchange, are a dead end, and a dangerous one. Yet arguing that GM - clearly a strategy involved in reorganising production to make it more pliable, more controllable by capital - is something that the left should support is a much more vulgar argument.
But then again, you do excell at being vulgar.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844