>What main ideas of B, M & F would mitigate if not eliminate the problems
>related to the following issue and no boilerplate please.
The article never mentioned how or why those chemicals get into the food-chain, only that they're "byproducts of the industrial age". Would a class-analysis a la Marx help figure that out and what might be done? Or would it just be completely erroneous and a waste of time?
I'm terribly sorry I can't match your erudition, Ian, with some quote or paraphrase of a main idea from Marx about chemicals entering the food chain.
I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but I'm just not a smart enough guy to find it.
>The below is an
>example of why many seasoned activists and others are extremely skeptical
>of the idea that 19th century political-economic analyses and the
>prescriptions that flow, however indeterminately, from them are inadequate
>for the challenges of the 21st century.
Yes, these authors wrote in a very different time; one could say a "simpler" time. And human society keeps growing and growing more complex too, right? So does that mean constantly, and earlier and earlier as society keeps changing, throwing out what's been observed and theorized? There are no "basic observations" that are valid any more? Marx wrote about class society, primarily the one with which he was most familiar; has class disappeared then? How about capitalism? It's changed, certainly, but aren't the basics (private ownership, appropriation of surplus labour, etc.) still there?
BTW, don't try to sell this line of obsolesence to the Christians about their "Old Man" . . . .
>Do we shut down the machines,
>complexify our technologies to the point where only Einstein's can
>understand how they work no matter how much we democratize big science and
>access to 'higher' education, what?
M (and I'm guessing), B, and F didn't talk about these particular questions, but about "bigger" matters that, I'm assuming, lie behind them.
These questions you ask, for all the good of talking about them, how can we even hope to do anything about them when we can't even get the tiniest say in such basic stuff as how to make sure people can be fed, clothed, and housed with a fair degree of human dignity?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be demanding a Theory of Everything to Fix Everything. The radical analyses I've read come closest to that (closer than liberal moralising anyway), but that doesn't make them perfect weapons to take on absolutely any problem.
Todd
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