[lbo-talk] agricultural productivity

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Apr 19 07:45:56 PDT 2010


On Apr 19, 2010, at 10:28 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:


> Yes, my position is that it would have been better if capitalist
> development
> had not driven millions from the land, reduced the capacity of women
> to
> control their own reproduction, forced the separation of home and
> work,
> radically increased the amount of work demanded, effectively forced
> the
> migration and immigration of millions of people and generated some
> of the
> most toxic living, working and cultural conditions imaginable.

Might have been, but what's your counterfactual? And compared with what? We've got what we've got, and some of it is good. How can we take what's good and get rid of the bad?

Still, I have some problems with your list. Women have more capacity now to control their reproduction than ever. What's so great about the unity of home and work? What's wrong with a multiplicity of realms? Why is migration always a bad thing? Should people stay in the village where they were born? This is all deeply conservative, very close to the romantic anticapitalism of the right, more so than the revolutionary anticapitalism of Marx.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list