> Alan writes:
>
> 'Increased agricultural productivity under capitalism has been exclusively
> subordinated to the production of surplus value, are you arguing otherwise?'
>
> No. But capitalist development, as Marx said, leads not only to the growth
> of the productive forces, but also the all round development of the human
> being - however qualified. And this is a case in point. The four billion
> human beings alive today because of the greater productivity of human
> labour, have better lives that they would have had without it.
>
Please go to the slums of Mexico City, or a raft of other cities across the South, and tell this to the burgeoning population who, however relatively impoverished, used to life off their own land, in their own communities, relying on each other, and most often in healthier conditions with access to cleaner water air and without anything like the rampant crime, corruption and drugs of their contemporary existence.
>
> Alan is sarcastic about the long-term fall in the price of food, but I am
> not, and I don't suppose many people who do their own shopping are, either.
> Over the last fifty years (less in the US) the share of household spending
> going to food fell from around a third to just over a tenth - that is
> greater disposable income people would not have had otherwise.
>
Yes, cost-cutting and monopolization have had absolutely no social, ecological, economic or political consequences... who could possibly think otherwise... and surely all that cheap food produced across the global south, intended for Northern markets has clearly increased the quality of the diets of the people in the areas where that food is produced, much less the cities where the folks displaced by production for export has subsequently moved.
>
> Alan: '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)... suggested by someone I once read to be fairly problematic'
>
> Well, of course, problematic, but I guess that the problem of two out of
> three of the world population's existence is a problem that it is better to
> have than not to.
>
I marvel at James' capacity to treat population growth as "natural increase" and his implicit assumption - contra pretty much anything any Marxist or socialist feminist have ever written on population grounded in Chapter 25 of Volume I of Capital - that there's really no need to address the social roots of this natural increase because what matters most is providing stuff - however contradictory that provisioning is - to that naturally increased population.
>
> Alan: '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'
>
> I am sorry, but that is just daft. Productivity increased. No amount of
> typing will magic that away.
>
Perhaps it did, I say it didn't. I pointed to Michael P's stuff, you appeal to that neo-Malthusian wank Lester Brown.
>
> Alan says of me that 'unequivocally arguing that increased agricultural
> productivity under capitalism is an unalloyed good verges on farcical when
> advanced by someone who calls themsevels a Marxist.'
>
> But what I said of agricultural labourers was not that their greater
> productivity was an unalloyed good, but that 'What we need is to ensure they
> get the whole output of their labour, not just the leftovers.'
>
> Yes, the basic structure, techniques, goals and commodity distribution
patterns of the dominant global food system are just fine, all we need to do
is redistribute wealth. Right.