[lbo-talk] SUNDAY (TODAY) NYC MEETING Against Genetic Engineering

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Jan 10 14:37:41 PST 2005



>Thomas Seay wrote:
>
>> > mitchelcohen at mindspring.com wrote:
>>>
>>> >This is a very important meeting for NYC-Metro area
>>> activists. It is
>>> >NOT a forum or workshop, it is an activist meeting
>>> to plan Area-wide
>>> >campaigns against Genetic Engineering.
>>
>>Are these people actually against genetic engineering
>>in toto or just against certain uses of genetic
>>engineering?
>>I can agree with the latter but not with the former.
>
>Me too. I'd love to hear someone articulate this intelligently, but
>most of the opposition I've seen so far comes from people who
>believe religiously in the innocent purity of Nature.
>
>Doug

I haven't been to any meeting against Genetic Engineering, but I bet oppositions to it are a mixed bag, ranging from those who are opposed to generic engineering under capitalist control to those who are opposed to genetic engineering, period, just like the anti-war movement, the environmentalist movement, the feminist movement, the labor movement, and other social movements on the left. You wouldn't get anywhere trying to start a movement that consists purely of individuals who are opposed to generic engineering under capitalist control but would favor it under hypothetical post-capitalist circumstances. When you realize that any social movement (especially in its infancy) is inevitably a mixed bag (with lots of nuts in it), what is to be done? Frederick Douglass was "convinced that it was duty of all anti-slavery men to promulgate their principles among the Free Soilers so that gradually 'a true Free Soil Party' could be established. 'We must go and lead the Free Soilers,' he told his audience at the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society a month after the election" in 1848 (_Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writing_, ed. Philip S. Foner, adopted and abridged by Yuval Taylor, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999). -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>



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