Lou says:
>Yoshie:
>>Let's forget about fast food as it is merely red herring in this
>>thread.
>
>Then why the heck did you and Carrol tell practically argue that opposition
>to MacDonalds is anti-working class? Surely you are aware that I read
>lbo-talk just as Doug reads the Marxism list archives. I found your
>performance around this question deeply troubling.
***** Re: On the important French Fry Question
From: Yoshie Furuhashi ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Date: Sun Jan 21 2001 - 12:41:24 EST
>John Thornton wrote:
>
>>On another note, what the hell are you people doing
>>patronizing McD's? I suppose you shop at WalMart too?
>
>Hmm, so where's it stop? The computer I'm typing on was made a giant
>multinational and assembled in Mexico. There's a stereo next to me
>made by Sony in China. The coffee I'm drinking came from Kenya, a
>country filled with poor and hungry people, and the beans were grown
>and picked under god knows what exploitative conditions. You don't
>really believe that individual consumption choices can clean an
>unclean world, do you?
>
>Doug
By John's criteria, only the rich who can afford _not_ to eat fast
food, shop at Wal-Mart, etc. can live morally correct lives. What
the masses buy is cheap mass products of sweatshop labor; what the
truly rich buy, in contrast, is expensive products of relatively
well-paid artisanal labor. Haute couture & formal dining at
fashionable restaurants (or better yet, _your own personal cook_,
well compensated year-around to provide meals _at home_, to your
taste & convenience) are good examples of the latter. Morally
correct consumption is a luxury that only those who don't & can't
count their own money can afford.
Yoshie
<http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0101/1160.html> *****
If you agree more with John Thornton than me, that's fine, but I
think that berating people who patronize fast food joints & shop at
WalMart & the like, in the absence of requests to boycott them from
workers who either work for them or produce inputs for their goods,
is counter-productive.
> >Is it possible to provide all human beings with food, clean
>>water, sanitation, shelter, energy, medicine, education,
>>transportation, etc. that are necessary to meet historically
>>developed minimum needs (setting aside other needs & desires for the
>>time being) under socialism?
>
>I am pretty sure that we can, but it will require *radical* adjustments
>including:
>
>1. overcoming the city-countryside split as called for in the Communist
>Manifesto.
>2. elimination of the automobile and jet plane except for extraordinary
>reasons.
>3. promotion of bicycles and trains and other forms of environmentally wise
>transportation.
>4. drastic reduction in meat eating.
>5. sharp cutback in fashion, luxury goods like Rolex watches, Mount Blanc
>pens, overseas vacations, fancy restaurants and delicatessens--ie.
>everything that goes into a "yuppie" lifestyle. In exchange for a reduction
>in these kinds of dubious "goodies" we achieve more free time and a sense
>of relief that we are not fucking over the rest of the world.
>6. in general, less is more as Mies van der Rohe put it.
1-6 won't solve the problem, though, if fossil fuels & clean water
are soon running out & there is no practical alternative energy
source, as Mark says. How do you make bicycles & run trains without
fuels?
Yoshie
