[lbo-talk] agricultural productivity (was Thatcherism)

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Sun Apr 18 14:17:22 PDT 2010


On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 15:39, brad bauerly <bbauerly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sean wrote:
>>his book "Stuffed and Starved" which is a good readable polemic on this issue.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> No it isn't.  It makes a pretty good paper weight or doorstop but is
> generally more of an ecological drain than any good that will ever
> come from it.

Well that's certainly a helpful review. If it's such an ecological drain, I'd be interested to know what you find so problematic about it as a text. As I indicated, it's more polemical than a careful academic study so there's some fuzziness with some of the points, but I think the points he makes are altogether pretty coherent and rely on a range of other kinds of studies. In many ways, the problem is less that he makes points that can't be validated elsewhere than that many of the points are made elsewhere and aren't exactly new; he just presents them in a way that might be more readable for a general public. Compared to work like that of Michael Pollin or even Eric Schlosser, he's much more engaged with the implications in the global south and for the labor movement more generally. I think that, at the moment, having a public intellectual who brings that perspective to the larger discussion is filling a valuable niche. Disabuse me of this notion rather than engaging in what is pretty much ad hominem critique.

s



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