><http://www.unfpa.org/swp/1999/pressumary1.htm>). What's
>fundamentally preventing us from providing people with means to meet
>their basic needs -- capitalism & imperialism or natural constraints?
Imperialism, but ecological imperialism to be more exact.
>If the former, socialism is the answer. If the latter, socialism is
>not only not the answer but may exacerbate the environmental problem,
>in that under capitalism the poor can be simply priced out of the
>market (as they have been) but under socialism all are entitled to
>the satisfaction of basic needs (at the very least), the fulfillment
>of which may make more demands upon natural resources (at least in
>the short term) than today, even if global socialism eliminates such
>sources of waste as production of weapons.
Look, Yoshie. If we are serious about these questions, the first thing we
have to stop doing is bullshiting about fast food being a "gain" for the
working class. I know it is very groovily "transgressive" to talk up
MacDonalds in leftwing circles, but it goes against the grain of what Marx
took seriously. This issue is not about morality but political economy.
Socialists have to explain to working people that their lifestyle is not
only *unhealthy* in the terms that Ralph Nader talked about, but that it
rests on fucking over peasants in places like Honduras and Nicaragua where
fast food beef comes from. When all the water and all the soil has been
exhausted in places like these, DelMonte and MacDonalds and Swift will go
somewhere else and do the same thing until the planet looks like Haiti.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
