[lbo-talk] agricultural productivity

[Alan Rudy]

Hello Zebra, nice stripes.
1) Increased agricultural productivity under capitalism has been exclusively
subordinated to the production of surplus value, are you arguing otherwise?
Dude, if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck one
can be pretty damn sure it's a duck.
2a) Thank you for suggesting I was pscho-pathological, at least I can read.
I wrote that people consume crappy food as part of crappy social
relationships, not that the crappy relationships resulted from or generate
the crappy food on their tables (though I guess its good to know that all
that is of importance is the amount of stuff produced in the aggregate and
whether or not it makes it to peoples' tables).   Under advanced industrial
capitalism, most people are more and more alienated from the production,
processing and preparation of the generally low quality - in terms of
nutrition and taste - food and consume it, quickly, for calories rather than
as a means of personal expression, interpersonal connection, much less as
part of the intentional collective production of material culture.  I hear
Soylent Green is people (and that this beef might have been fed beef and
sheep brains) but, well, at least there's plenty of it!
2b) It is remarkable how many times in these exchanges you have conflated
quantity and quality, bravo.  It is further remarkable that you bracket the
issue of quantity from any and all of its agricultural, ecological, social,
cultural and political economic consequences, double bravo.  It is just so
awesome that we have at our disposal ever greater volumes of genetically
simpified, over-processed, and over-preserved foods... either that or
high-priced, niche and foodie quality wankerdom so explicitly juxtaposed
against the vulgar tastes of the unwashed masses.  It is SO cool watching
the global overproduction of organic, fair trade, shade grown, living wage,
specialty roasted coffee... cuz, well, there's so much of it its getting
cheaper and cheaper, whoohooo!  Like Super Sugar Smacks, MacDonalds and
Starbucks bakery goods, everyone I know just NEEDS more of that stuff, thank
goodness its available... and CHEAP at Wal-Mart.  No contradictions that I
can see, hey gimme another one of those.
2c) Michael P.'s analysis - which is really good, you might want to loook
into it, however much it was executed two decades ago - pretty clearly shows
that we have not increased productivity per labor hour if one takes the time
to look beyond the reductionist, asociological and anti-ecological realm of
the firm/the farm.
3) The reason we have four billion people on the planet presently being fed
the way they are is primarily because of the kinds of displacement and
alientation tied to colonialism/capitalism (but especially capitalism of
late) - that capitalism is capable of producing commoditied to poorly
satisfy the needs produced by the enclosures and alienations at its
foundation was suggested by someone I once read to be fairly problematic...
I wonder who that was.  Your argument basically argues that capitalism's
tendency to accelerate the turnover time of capital in the name of
satisfying the needs it produces ought to be ceaselessly encouraged because
its been so good at increasing productivity in the past... or are you only
arguing that this is the case in agrifood, not in energy, industry or
finance?
4) You don't have to argue that the planet is some sort of self-aware living
organism to acknowledge that there is life other than human life on the
planet and that much of that life is necessary for maintaining our lives,
much less its quality... but you keep on arguing for making more and more
stuff and see how well it serves as a path to something other than more of
the same stuff, the same politics and the same economics we've got today.
If your socialism seeks to generate ever more production rather than ever
better conditions of life, I'm thinking your socialism's gonna have some
problems, but heck that's just me, and I've got some kind of
autobiographical psychopathology to which you can dismissively attribute all
things you're reductionist approach fails to fathom.  Produce, produce,
produce... don't ever stop, there might be more people who need more stuff
and it'll pave the way to socialism, sounds like Marx to me...

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 12:00 PM, JAMES Heartfield <
heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:


> Alan writes 'The point left-populist, left-weberian, anarchist and
> socialist
> scholars have been making for 100 years is that increasing productivity and
> rationalization in agriculture - because of the contradictions of the
> system
> - causes hunger, malnutrition, obesity and generally shitty food.'
>
> If that were true, it would only reflect badly on those 'scholars'.
> Increased productivity is not in itself a bad thing, it is the
> subordination
> of productivity of use values to the production of surplus value that is
> the
> problem.
>
> ' Rather than more people being fed better, it produces more people, some
> of
> whom are fed better, most of whom who are fed well-enough feed themselves
> crappy, uninspired food produced and consumed as part of crappy,
> uninspiring
> social relationships, and huge numbers of people fed far far worse all
> around. '
>
> It would be surreal (or perhaps just some unintended autobigraphical
> psychopathology) to argue that people's uninspiring social relationships
> reflect badly on the food on their table. Yes, it is true that people ought
> to be better fed. It is for that reason we ought to be pleased with the
> greater output of food that human labour achieves.
>
> 'The whole idea of socialism is to increase the quality of life for people
> and the planet'
>
> (the planet is not alive, but let's leave that to one side) you cannot have
> an improved quality of life if you have no life at all. Four billion human
> beings owe their existence to the improvements in agricultural productivity
> that have taken place. What we need is to ensure they get the whole output
> of their labour, not just the leftovers.
>
>