From Eric to Doug:
> >The point is that capitalism has given us material wealth and
> >sophisticated technology, but it's done a very bad job of using those
> >things to better the lives of all. Before Coxian pessimism became
> >hegemonic on the left
>
>"Before Coxian pessimism became hegemonic"? Do I hear the sniffles of a
>misty-eyed appeal to some glorious past (that probably never existed)?
>
>Since the cause of hunger is food distribution, not (the capabilities of)
>food production, the retreat position of advocating GM foods conceals a
>pessimism much deeper than the Coxian kind: We can cure starvation by
>flooding the market with biotech-created foods and hope that they trickle
>down to Africa, Asia, Latin America. In the long term, this thinking admits
>defeat--the capitalist relations that impede equitable food distribution
>aren't going to disappear. In the short term, it assumes that the market
>will find the people you want it to benefit.
***** Monthly Review Volume 50, Number 3 July-August 1998
Introduction to Hungry for Profit by Fred Magdoff, Frederick H. Buttel, and John Bellamy Foster
Historically, the significance of agriculture to the origin and development of capitalism cannot be overemphasized. The development of capitalism in England depended on the increasing surpluses resulting from an agriculture in the throes of major technical and social transformations. And England's distinctive patterns of land holding created a new kind of market dependency in agricultural production that was critical to the initiation of dynamic capitalist relations geared to constant productivity growth (see Wood, this issue). In subsequent development, the rise of industry in no way left agriculture behind, but was mirrored (indeed in some cases prefigured) at each stage by changes in the latter.
Agriculture, which has been dominated for decades in the United States and, more recently in the rest of the world, by large agribusiness corporations, is now once again undergoing rapid, even unprecedented change. To be sure, much of this story-concentration and centralization of capital and exodus of peasants and farmers from the land-is not new. But the trends witnessed in agriculture in the late twentieth century are distinctive in several important respects. Concentration and centralization and rural dispossession within this sector are being reinforced by new technological innovations, particularly in the area of biotechnology, leading to such developments as the proletarianization of the farmer, and to the appropriation of ownership and control of indigenous plants and animals in third world countries. The global commodification of agriculture has its counterpart in the destruction of peasant and small-scale agriculture throughout the world. Subsistence farming is in decline in the third world while the production of luxury crops for export to the rich countries is being expanded as never before. The result is a rise in world food supplies, together with an increase in world hunger. So sharp are these contradictions that hunger is expanding in the United States itself, at the very heart of the system, where it is no longer surprising to see food lines and soup kitchens. The growth of agribusiness has also generated more and more ecological problems through the subdivision of traditional diversified farming into specialized production, the break in the soil nutrient cycle, the pollution of land and water (and food itself) with chemicals, soil erosion and other forms of destruction of agricultural ecosystems, and so on....
...Just as remarkable as the globalization of the agro-industrial chain of production and distribution are the trends in the United States and most other nations toward the industrialization of agriculture and contractual integration. Recognizing that farming tends not to be very profitable and that cheapening the cost of obtaining raw food products is a key to corporate profitability, agribusiness firms have begun to develop "industrial"-or factory-style-production systems and contractual integration arrangements in which the decisions about how to produce crops and animals are increasingly being taken over by the large agribusinesses (see Lewontin, this issue). In the extreme situation, such as poultry growers under contract to Tyson or Perdue, or hog producers under contract to Murphy Family Farms, independent farmers are reduced to the position of laborers, but without the rights of workers to collectively bargain....
...In the Third World, displacement of farmers under internal pressures, as well as external pressures arising from growing imports from the first world, has led to a loss of huge numbers of people from the land, and has resulted in the swelling of cities.
Technology to the Rescue?
A number of technological fixes have been proposed for the environmental problems of agriculture and food. For example, instead of solving food safety problems by shortening the distance between the point of production and the point of consumption, and producing animals in a small-scale, stress-free, pleasant and clean environment, industry has been promoting irradiation of meat as a cure to bacterial contamination....
..."The moral of the tale," Marx wrote in Capital (vol. III, chapter 6, section 2), "is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers."...
[The full article is available at <http://www.monthlyreview.org/798fredm.htm> *****
Class struggles first, before the majority of people get to benefit from technological fixes. Under capitalism, techno fixes have been presented as _substitutes_ for radical social transformation to bring about the socialist relations of production for needs, not profits, as Eric argues.
Yoshie
P.S. I hope folks will read the entire issue! Please read "The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism" by Ellen Meiksins Wood, at least.