> "Grant Lee" <grantlee at iinet.net.au
>>If that is your definition, then the
>> introduction of capitalist livestock
>> industries, in the last 18th Century, was the most significant genocidal
>> act of all.
>
> Calling Dr. Heidegger! "“Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in
> essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and
> the extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of the
> countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen bombs.”
That was a mighty big "if" of mine.
I think one of the things that 20th Century Marxism and Heidegger had in common --- and these two streams actually came together, e.g. in the person of Marcuse --- is a problem grasping the immanent duality of industrialisation, i.e. abundance and scarcity occuring in close proximity. I mean, under Marx’s General Law Of Capitalist Accumulation, in a society with fully capitalist relations of production, ‘ … it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.’ (Marx, 1867, _Capital_, Vol. 1, Part VII ‘The Accumulation of Capital’, Chapter 25: ‘The General Law Of Capitalist Accumulation’, Section 3 ‘Progressive Production Of A Relative Surplus-Population Or Industrial Reserve Army.’)