Hmmm. I thought the conclusion was that European workers were consuming too much, not non-European ones.
--- On Fri, 5/1/09, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] 35-cent ice cream and anarchist theory
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, May 1, 2009, 3:58 PM
> Joseph Catron: "mainstream ecology
> would hold that the Earth cannot support anything close to
> six billion people with lifestyles remotely approaching that
> of the average Western worker"
>
> Yes, it is convenient that science keeps coming up with
> reason why non-Europeans must be kept in poverty. In 1845
> political economists told us that the Irish famine was a
> natural necessity; in 1932 the International Eugenic
> Conference assured us that it made sense to curb the
> non-white races; in the 1960s development theory assured us
> that third world economies would reach their "take off" some
> time soon; in the 1970s the computer scientists working for
> the Club of Rome assured us that oil and other minerals
> would run out by 1992 at current growth rates; around the
> same time Kissinger's National Security Memo said that
> curbing population in the third world was a strategic
> interest of the US; in the 1980s it was the turn of the
> neoclassical economists to explain that third world states
> should sell of their assets and float their currencies; and
> today the "global footprint" people are arguing once again
> that it is impossible for third world peoples to raise their
> consumption. !
> Funny that the scientific explanations keep changing, but
> the conclusion always remains the same.
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