[lbo-talk] agricultural productivity

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Mon Apr 19 08:16:54 PDT 2010


;-) Of course I don't have a counterfactual and how we take what's good, get rid of the bad and make it all better is exactly what I suggested was possible given what we now know... but James didn't like that. SOME women have more capacity to control their reproduction, across the global south - particularly in impoverished areas where population and food are least well connected, there is often very little of such control... Lappe and Schurman's whole point. I actually have less of a problem with the separation of work and home, and migration, etc. than I suggested... at the same time, many aspects of such things really really suck. Mea culpa, I got carried away.

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> 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
>
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>

-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319



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