[lbo-talk] What is socialism?

[Alan Rudy]

Um, dude, you seem to have left out the fact that South Korea and Japan are
major major food importing nations... the percentage of the population in
agriculture isn't always an indicator of agricultural productivity and
agricultural productivity isn't always an indicator of self-sufficiency much
less a measure of anything like sustainable relations between agriculture
and urbanization.
I'm no Malthusian apocalypticist or romantic back-to-the-lander but
overconfident, technophilic and hypermodernist approaches like the one you
presented here are clearly limited in their analytic depth and their sense
of the social and environmental contradictions of the capitalist agrifood
system.

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:


> Somebody:
>
> Why does it matter what percentage of the population is involved in
> agriculture? Because it's a fundamental indicator of agricultural
> productivity. Advanced countries can produce enough food to supply
> themselves with much less than 20% of the population. A lower-tier
> industrialized nation like South Korea has 7% of it's labor force involved
> in agriculture. Japan, which has encouraged small-scale cultivation since
> it's land reform, still has only 4% of it's population working in the
> fields. A country where one in five people cultivate the land isn't fully
> developed. Again, this only matters if we share the traditional Marxist goal
> of developing the productive forces.
>