>
> Having said that, personally, I do not see the hopes of mankind as resting
> entirely upon the feeble shoulders of the working class and poor. The main
> means of improving humanities condition is through technological progress.
> Under decades-long right-wing dictatorships like Suharto, Chaing Kai-shek,
> and Franco, life in fact improved enormously for most of the people. Not
> because of the regimes, but in spite of them, simply because the productive
> forces were expanded, bringing improved living standards, and raising the
> condition of the rural masses. If Stalin had lived a hundred years, life in
> the Soviet Union would have improved as it did under Khrushchev and
> Brezhnev, because the country was industrialized. This doesn't mean politics
> are irrelevant; far from it. But, they're just less central than the left
> likes to imagine. Life for a middle class worker in Shanghai, amongst the
> most developed of cities in the People's Republic of China, is not so
> different than life for their counterpart in the democratic Republic of
> China across the straits. The Taiwanese worker can vote, has universal
> access to health care, and a safety net. The Shanghai worker, without these
> things, is still probably more like his Taiwanese friend, in health, living
> standards, and consumerist outlook, than he is like the peasant farmer in
> Yunnan province in his own country.
>
>
1. Joanna's right.
2. If you work for a living you're a member of the working class.
3. Really, technological progress? In and of itself? Isn't that what has
displaced hundreds of millions of relatively self-sufficient
peasants/farmers across the global south producing the most socially and
ecologically destructive conditions known - third world slums?
4. You see, there was this guy, Marx (and if you want a left Weberian you
could try Allan Schnaiberg), who kinda sorta clearly argued fairly well that
a) the aggregate level of human immiseration generated by capitalist
technological "progress" is far higher than the net benefit to capitalist
and professional classes and b) the ecological consequences for soils,
water, air - much less species extinction, forest and wetland conservation,
and - now quite clearly - climate change radically outstrip the increased
quality of life for a minority of the world's population.
5. Have you ever heard that increases in net efficiency produce far greater
jumps in gross consumption and waste under capitalism?
6. When in doubt, make sure you completely ignore the ways that capital and
technology-driven social and ecological crises are displaced in space and
time by the developments you so calmly trumpet.