At 9:30 AM 1/5/96, Jacqueline Romanow wrote: >Instead she picks up the key threads of rural-based sustainable >production and heralds them as central to an egalitarian and sustainable >economy. Is this a fair representation of actually existing or recently existing rural production? What social mechanism could sustain these egalitarian rural enclaves against the power of external capitalist competition and consciousness-formation? What does this model have to say to the vast urban populations of the so-called Third World, especially the middle income countries of Latin America, Eastern Europe, or the FSU? Are we really to empty our cities (and, no doubt, our universities) to go back to the land in the name of sustainability? >She is highly critical of the notion that all that is termed "progress" >is good simply because it is "progress". Industrialism has done >irreparable damage to our environment, and because it was instilled by >the hands of men it was done so in such a way as to marginalise women >and the natural world. Time was when feminists would recoil at the easy equivalence of women and the natural world, or the notion that pre-industrial domestic relations were such a model for utopia. But I won't wax nostalgic. Of course technological change doesn't automatically equal progress. But in its retreat from Marxism, the "left," whatever the hell that means anymore, has turned from a critical attitude towards science to an anti-scientific one. It's hard to take seriously somone who can write (as Shiva did): "When we consider the complexity and inter-relatedness of the cycles by which Gaia maintains her balances, the massiveness of the disruptions which we now impose on her, the primitive quality of the scientific material by which we attempt to decipher her clues, then truly we can speak of a man-made ignorance, criminal or pitiful, depending on your point of view, in our relations with Gaia." Doug -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
