Thomas Kruse wrote:
>Let's get specific. What do you have in mind when you say "positive aspects
>of capitalist modernization"? Mass politics? Flush toilets? Pen-l chat
>spaces? This is dicey. A particular kind of capitalist modernization
>(welfare state) produced a certain kind of generalized prosperity in certain
>places for a certain period. But many argue (still) that it was had at the
>cost of other's immiseration (the old dependency school business).
Or the old Marx school business, even, with poverty being produced
alongside wealth.
What positive aspects? Antibiotics, mass literacy, births that don't kill
mother or infant, air travel, Baudelaire, telephones, astrophysics. Stuff
like that. But whatever you think of capitalist modernization, it's a fact
of life, part of our social inheritance, those unchosen tools we make
history with. So the question is what we do with them. What's the better
use for antibiotics - so Frank Purdue can crowd chickens closer together,
or so a sick kid in Nairobi doesn't have to die?
Doug
