[lbo-talk] Re: Aundhati Roy on the brewing instability in India

[info at pulpculture.org]

At 10:52 PM 5/31/2006, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Doug Henwood wrote:
> > On May 31, 2006, at 7:25 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> > > In the particular category you describe (that
> > > of black males who do well), the ones who do well are not doing well
> > > BECAUSE other black males are doing poorly!
> >
> > How's that? Is there some racial zero-sum balancing mechanism?
> >
>
>Do you shut off your brain when you read my posts, or are you dyslexic?
>One worker's misery is not _because_ of another workers's comfort.
>A capitalist's well-doing is _because_ of the ill-doing of millions.
>Carrol

I am confused, though. You also wrote:


>Those who "do well" fall into two categories.

and


>But I believe in the case of India we are talking about millions who do 
>very well precisely BECAUSE
>10s or 100s of millions are doing very badly indeed. If Roy is even partly 
>correct, those dams are responsible for the "doing well" of 10s of 
>thousands and the doing very badly indeed of 100s of millions -- and the 
>two can't be separated.

Was this just a typo -- were it me, it probably would have been (heh). In 
one instance you speak of millions who are doing well b/c of 100s of 
millions who do badly. In the very next sentence, 10s of thousands are 
doing well on the backs of those doing badly.

I took the two different categories of numbers that to mean two different 
kinds of "doing well":

  -- that of the 10s of thousands of capitalists

and

  -- that of millions of relatively well-to-do workers in the 
over-developed world.

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