granted, modern-capital techniques have brought great progress, but this is no late breaking bulletin : see the communist manifesto...but...
if we wind up with one farm worker "feeding" the whole country from some automated, computerized, capital profit making machine, will more people be eating? and will what they eat be the healthiest quality? fat chance...
obviously, no matter what technology is employed, if it is employed not to feed people first, but to make a profit first, that is the problem, and not how many people work(?) on the farm and how many tv sets they own at home...
of couse this is all theoretical, but it is, or certainly should be possible to rotate crops, employ people, creat healthy , nutritious food in abundance and feed every damn person on the planet...whether there is too much or too little stoop labor doesn't really figure into whether the economic foundation of the society is to feed first, or to profit from the sale of food product, first...
as long as the second economic principle rules, no matter how many of us are sitting on our asses, having eaten wonderful food purchased at the gourmet deli or wherever, there will be more people - somewhere - living in squalid poverty as a result of our system's fractured economic morality...
and by the way, i've done manual as well as mental labor, and while mental is much, much easier on the body, it taxes the mind anyway, so what's the big deal? look at all the "information-service-white collar" types who spend money and time going to a gym or health spa in order to work off the fat or burn the calories and energy they haven't been able to use because they've been "liberated" from manual labor...
how about a balanced life style for everyone, with a political economy that enables such? we aint gonna get it , ever, with this system... nor with debates that label people as fundamentalist rejecters of progress, if they question "modern" techniques of capital accumulation - even if they dont say that every time ...
fs
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