The intermediate point might be that what has been learned about increasing productivity, its costs, possibilities and alternative routes represents a set of potentially fecund relationships with which one can envision and develop plans for more productive and less socially and ecologically damaging agricultural dynamics.
On the one hand, even conventional production committed to producing less food for animals and more complex and high quality foods for human beings - and done so with less in the way of factory farm monocropping could be far far more sustainable... though this is far from preferable.
On the other hand, largely marginalized scholars at public institutions have developed any number of agroecological production and political ecologically just frameworks for more sustainable agrifood systems that embrace complex divisions of labor, generate the need for far less labor time and are neither romantic nor conservative.
One of the things I really like about Robert Gottlieb's book, Forcing the Spring, is that the argument is made, and historical data presented, that the weakness of the historical left has in fact generated a situation where the contemporary left is doing whatever it can to defend existing unions, OSHA, public health, gender equality, EPA and public space regulations... separately. From my reading, Gottlieb shows how part of what happened over the course of the 20th century is that Progressive reformers appropriated - in piecemeal and dis-integrated fashion - what had been a far more synthetic and integrative politics of the left. Whether anarchist, populist, socialist or communist, and despite the fact that ecological, personal and cultural conditions were often of secondary or tertiary importance, the left politics of the first half of the twentieth century often tied sustainable extraction and production to labor relations, occupational safety, public space (built and wild), public health, public education and social justice along class, sex/gender and racial (if, less frequently, sexual) lines.
Or at least those are some semi-random late night, late in the week, thoughts from mid-Michigan.
Alan
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 16, 2010, at 8:05 PM, brad bauerly wrote:
>
>
> Richard wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Most of what passes for 'change' under capitalism is seriously damaging,
>>> sometimes devastating, to the majority of human beings on the planet.
>>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> This is utter lunacy. How about agricultural productivity.
>>
>
> How can agricultural productivity be measured without fully accounting for
> long-term exhaustion of soil and water resources and the polluting and
> climatic consequences of the fertilizer and pesticide inputs needed for that
> famous "productivity," not to mention the ecological and climatic
> consequences of the deforestation and monocultures required for the
> livestock industry component of your "productivity?" Isn't the lunacy
> precisely in the capitalist concept of agricultural productivity--the
> heedless plundering of all natural resources in order to increase "output"
> levels?
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
>
> > This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> > always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> > kindling in measures and going out in measures."
> >
> > Herakleitos of Ephesos
>
>