Obviously (what's the Left problem with GM food?)

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Fri Oct 20 09:04:31 PDT 2000


In message <39F04D4E.E1E8C290 at ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes
>One of the hardest perceptions not only for left liberals but for all too many
>marxists to achieve is the recognition of the utter falsity of the 19th-century
>bourgeois Idea of Progress -- the assumption, rooted in the early 'amazing'
>successes of capitalism and supported by puerile versions of Darwinism -- that
>Progress is certain and that all change is for the better.

'Utter falsity?' This is the hyperbolic language of Yeats not Marx. The idea of progress utterly false? That would be an interesting one. Of course the straw man that Carrol sets up is unattainable, and believed by no-one, already parodied by that inveterate bourgeois Voltaire, 'that everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds'. Was there ever anyone who fit that caricature? No. Of course not.

Far from being certain, progress is precisely what is in the balance. The enemies of progress who want to rip up the test crops of GM plants, are the head of Greenpeace, Lord Mond of Imperial Chemicals Industries and the richest landowner in Britain, the Prince of Wales. (Bear in mind that these no-nothings were destroying a test to try and discover what harms there might be in GM crops)


>Most changes are
>destructive.

The true voice of misanthropic conservatism. Every day millions of children are born, but to Carrol, 'most changes are destructive'. Notice that this proposition is not empirical but a priori. It tells us nothing about change and everything about Carrol for whom most things that men do are bad, a disturbance of God's will.


> And it will only be our great-great grandchildren (if capitalism
>doesn't destroy humanity first) who will have any real grasp of which
>technological changes were in reality progress and which were merely part of the
>destructive development of capitalism.

Moronic. Any change that abbreviates the labour time necessary for the production of men's means of existence is plainly progressive, however limited its application.


>
>The Idea of Progress was killed intellectually in the Communist Manifesto
>("mutual
>ruin of the contending parties")

Ever the miserablist, Carrol picks out that part of the Manifesto that stands as a warning to those who would refuse the choice between progress and reaction. Only a true misanthropist could imagine that the mutual ruin of the contending classes was Marx's preferred outcome, or that that he thought most likely. -- James Heartfield



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