>Lou, if I could do it with a wave of my hand, I would wipe MacDonalds
>off the face of the earth. The institution of fast food is undoubtedly
>vicious. But attacking _people_ rather than the institutions that
>exploit them is just politically stupid. I don't really remember very
>well the specific thread -- but I have very consistently on LBO attacked
>generic attacks on people.
This is not about attacking "people". It is about educating yourself and
educating others on the nature of ecological imperialism. In the entire
discussion about Macdonalds french fries on Doug's list which seemed to
have gone on longer than the thread on Andrew Sullivan's sex life,
nobody--including you and Yoshie--ever seemed interested in where the stuff
came from. It appeared to be a debate with two contrary but inadequate
positions. People who read Utne Reader, wore Birkenstocks and took
vacations in Costa Rica versus people who concluded from an undialectical
reading of Karl Marx that the inexorable process of capitalist
industrialization paves the way for socialism. In fact the inexorable
process of capitalist industrialization paves the way to ruin and nothing
else.
"All criticism of small-scale landownership is ultimately reducible to
criticism of private property as a barrier and obstacle to agriculture. So
too is all counter-criticism of large landed property. Secondary political
considerations are of course left aside here in both cases. It is simply
that this barrier and obstacle which all private property in land places to
agricultural production and the rational treatment, maintenance and
improvement of the land itself, develops in various forms, and in
quarreling over these specific forms of the evil its ultimate root is
forgotten.
"Small-scale landownership presupposes that the overwhelming majority of
the population is agricultural and that isolated labour predominates over
social; wealth and the development of reproduction, therefore, both in its
material and intellectual aspects, is ruled out under these circumstances,
and with this also the conditions for a rational agriculture. On the other
hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever
decreasing minimum and confronts it with an every growing industrial
population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces
conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process
of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life
itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil,
which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.
"If small-scale landownership creates a class of barbarians standing half
outside society, combining all the crudity of primitive social forms with
all the torments and misery of civilized countries, large landed property
undermines labor-power in the final sphere to which its indigenous energy
flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the vital
power of the nation, on the land itself. Large-scale industry and
industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they
are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and
ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter
does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later
course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture
also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part
provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil."
V. 3 of Capital, "The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent"
Louis Proyect
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