Quoth you:
>It was a response to the sentimental appeal to "local ownership," not
>specifically about food, and it wasn't an appeal to authority, it was
>a quote of a passage that expresses very well something I
>enthusiastically agree with. The point is that technology and
>internationalization are both very good things, in potential, but
>that that potential is distorted and limited by their fate under
>capitalism.
Whoa, comrade! There's nothing necessarily sentimental about appeals to local ownership - I would in fact suggest it's generally safe to argue that the only thing worse than local ownership is non-local ownership. Shit food and expatriated profits are a Bad Thing. Good food and locally (albeit equally unfairly) distributed profits are a Better Thing. Democratic ownership (which would, incidentally, entail a meaningful degree of local ownership) is the Best Thing, sure, but even then, if there's one tactic more hopeless than refusing to eat Big Macs, it's eating the bloody things.
And 'technology' and 'internationalisation' mean absolutely bugger-all sans context - in a different setting, they'd be the very best of things, but in the matter at issue, because in today's context, they're not. Simple.
Seems to me the logical culmination of your position is 'let their 'globalisation' go as it will, and wait for it to reach some kinda natural limit, at which moment there'll be a revolution, and we can start milking the hitherto unrealised goodness in it all'. Really, that's all I can see in what you're saying! And if that is what you're saying (and I really hope I've missed something), then we're in the province of that Keynes quote about making it too easy for ourselves (given that the predictive part has any truth in it) and everyone being dead in 'the long run'. Aren't we?
>Student anti-sweatshop activists, taking their cue from the workers,
>are opposed to boycotts against the likes of Nike. They want the
>workers to be well paid and decently treated and free to organize,
>not disemployed.
I can't get the sand shoes I used to get, nor get anything like 'em for the price I used to pay, coz of this entirely manufactured craze for the pedal equivalent of the SUV. I hate it. Period. Anyway, what, other than conditional boycotts ('don't be any worse than your competitors on these criteria, or else') is there on the left's list of options?
I get the impression that to say anything at all used to be better than it is now is a big no-no for the left - that we'd be guilty of reactionary romantic petit bourgeois sentimentalism or some such nonsense. Well, I suggest we'd better be very explicit and particular when we start talking like that, else we'd lose the capacity to say important stuff's getting worse under the order du jour - which kinda compromises our shot at radical critique just a tad, no?
We're getting 'demand-managed' to numbing, shallow, gratuitously competitive, sense-depriving, health-diminishing, brand-struck uniformity, for mine, and it's worse today than it was twenty years ago. Ergo, lotsa stuff was better twenty years ago than it is now.
If that's sentimentalism, I'm a Tory.
Yours bemused, Rob.