>Doug Henwood:
>> I remember a quote from Durenmatt's play The Physicists, which I read
>> in high school German class long ago, which runs something like:
>> "Every attempt by an individual to solve that which concerns all must
>> fail."
>
>Hence, every attempt to solve that which concerns all must
>fail, since it would have to start with one individual or
>another -- unless you postulate some kind of group mind,
>which seems rather in the right-wing bag.
No, that's not what it means at all. I pressed it into service to say that there's no way that individual consumption practices can extricate oneself from an exploitative society. You can use free software, but you've got to run it on machines made by evil large corporations. You can shun meat and spare animals, but what about the migrant workers who pick the cucumbers?
One of my favorite little factoids: organic produce requires more stoop labor than the ordinary kind. So is it more "moral" to eat organic food?
Doug