> These kinds of comparisons are misleading because of the
> more intense commodification of goods and services in industrialized
> societies. You need to buy stuff to survive in "advanced"
> industrial societies like the U. S.; that isn't true for a
> surprisingly large proportion of the world population
> (subsistence farming, herding, mutual aid, bartering are still
> common outside urban centers in many poor nations). This
> makes the $1/day statistic misleading, because many people
> in the world are not really capitalist "consumers" (yet).
Am just now re-reading Cleaver's _Reading Capital Politically_, and appreciating his point that the imposition of the commodity-form on workers' lives, so that they have to buy (nearly) everything they need and want, is key to the establishment of the capitalist system -- i.e., converting ordinary folks into "workers" in the capitalist system.
This is of course another stupid question, but I wonder if the capitalist system is likely to eventually be imposed everywhere, so that the people you point to as not yet consumers will all eventually become ones.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt