Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak wrote: Maybe not. It's perfectly possible that some crops are better industrialized and some not. Or it's possible that all are better industrialized. I'd just like to see some reliable figures and causal explanations of why this is so. But just to take your first example of cotton, are we sure cotton really is an exception? Our man Roger Thurow at the Wall Street Journal (who seems to be working Mali beat) wrote an article that was posted to Pen-l a month ago that seems to suggest the opposite: You could be right about cotton production in Mali. My point is not about cotton production for exports. My point was about textile industry: yarn, cloth, garments etc. For countries like China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka etc., textiles are an important item in exports. China's textile exports are about $50 bn (I don't have precise number), India's exports of textlies are about $10 bn etc. Indian exports will not be able to compete with other nations' textile exports, if Indian textile industry is globally not competitive. The same is true of other nations as well. One important component of cost structure of textile industry is cotton cost. One method of cutting cost is by improving yields on cotton farms. The quality of cotton also influences sales price and profitabiity. This factor is putting presssure on textile exporting nations to make changes in cotton farming. e.g. introduction of GM cotton. If Indian cotton farms are only half as productive as Chinese farms, Indian textile exports would not competitive. This pressure will grow, since textile trade is going to free from 2005. Ulhas
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug Henwood wrote: ravi wrote: so what is wrong with sitting at home and mashing lentils? isn't the point that the choice be available? as for shiva's point: it's unimportant whether its men who are doing it or women (she says women because they are doing it today). the point she makes is that it is preferable for men and women to sit at home and mashing lentils than to adopt industrialized processes that afford some of them the ability to fly about town or do whatever else. i see no different rule: educated professional women fly around the world to earn a living. uneducated peasant women mash lentils at home. the rule is that neither of them should have their avenue to make a living taken away. your argument and that of corporations attempting to impose industrialization on india would seem to take away this livelihood from them (the peasant women) without necessarily providing them a means to join the jetsetting educated women's class. or is the theory that the resulting abject poverty would bring about the glorious revolution? Fuck no. I thought the point was to get beyond this depressing binary of traditional life and capitalism - to use the socialization of production and technology in liberating rather than oppressive profit-maximizing ways. yes, that is a lofty goal and i am all for it. but have the advantages of technology and industrialization been so well established and can any form of protest against them (whether normative, or pragmatic such as in pointing out the problems with the arising complexity) be dismissed as naive primitivism? can we escape the binary while at the same time insisting that mass production/technology not be regressed? should not criticism of all sorts be kept alive, especially of such pervasive and well-established modes of life? And the attitude among women towards capitalist employment is a lot more ambiguous than moralizing tracts a la Shiva would suggest. ... I notice that Shiva's biggest fans are in the West, among people who shop at (organic) supermarkets. but isnt this guilt by association? so perhaps some of those who shop at organic stores are silly activists (and i would venture that they are still preferable to ken lay), but that does not, i am sure you will agree, negate all arguments in favour of organic food. i agree that in my little reading of shiva, i do not walk away with the impression of hearing a direct mouthful from those concerned, but then you mention naila kabeer [sp?] - is she a representative? does she provide examples of representative voices in india in favour of industrialization? are there no contrary voices at all? when the people of india throw their weight behind a voice (ranging from pro-industrialists to the fundamentalist BJP) are they exercising meaningful choice? --ravi
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote: You could be right about cotton production in Mali. My point is not about cotton production for exports. My point was about textile industry I don't think that changes the basic equation, Ulhas. The question still is, how best to produce cotton of a suitable quality the cheapest given the relative costs of the imputs. If labor is cheap, then it seems productivity per man hour should be a less important part of that equation than productivity per unit land and per unit exogenous imput (i.e., per units fixed and working capital). I think two debates have melted together here. One is the question of whether small scale agriculture can produce as cheaply as large scale agriculture for some, all, or no crops -- i.e., whether agriculture is an exception to the general rule that greater industrialization always equals greater productivity and cheaper product -- especially when low-wage countries are competing with high wage ones. The second is whether GM crops should be admitted to the fields of India. And specifically in this case, whether Bt cotton use should be expanded. The argument for as I understand it is that it's cheaper because you can spend less on pesticides. The argument against is that this gain will only be short term because there is evidence the pests are already bulding a Bt resistance. I'm inclined to think that's true, but I don't know why that would make introducing Bt cotton a bad idea -- at least there would have been a few years of fewer pesticides. In other words, I'm not your opponent on that second question. I'm simply not very booked up on it. And it's a little orthogonal to the small scale/large scale debate -- it's just one small, and perhaps transient, factor in toting up the costs on either side. Michael
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak wrote: snip The second is whether GM crops should be admitted to the fields of India. And specifically in this case, whether Bt cotton use should be expanded. The argument for as I understand it is that it's cheaper because you can spend less on pesticides. The argument against is that this gain will only be short term because there is evidence the pests are already bulding a Bt resistance. I'm inclined to think that's true, but I don't know why that would make introducing Bt cotton a bad idea -- at least there would have been a few years of fewer pesticides. Michael There are at least two problems. One is that right now cotton, though normally grown with very harsh poisons, can be grown with some fairly mild BT based pesticides -admittedly at the expense of some productivity. When the no pesticide cotton period is up, only the harshest of pesticides will be usuable, and not all of them. In short, due to pest reisistance, there will be a narrower range of options available. The second problem, as has been shown with corn, is that the geners will spread to other plants. So on the one hand pests that prey on all types of crops, not just those that prey on cotton will become pesticide resistance. And on the other hand weeds will grown hardier. I'm not in principle against GM. But right now, in the hands of the big biotech companies it is being done carelessly at least, and in some cases with the deliberate intent of wiping aout competing methods of agriculture, and of maintaining monopoly rights. BT crops in general are a means of wiping out competing means of agriculture that depened on natural BT based pesticides that break down before entering the food chain or water table. Terminator crops, are a means of enforcing intellectual property rights on seeds; they have no other purpose. The record of thsoe actually developing and producing GM crops is beyond horrible. So as each particular GM crop is developed, I think we need to look at it carefully, and (given who is producing it) consider it guilty until proven innocent.
Re: Vandana Shiva
At 11:43 PM -0500 7/28/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Anyone who has followed the experience of the 'green revolution' (sic) knows about the problems that it has produced and the fact that it has exacerbated class problems by displacing the poor farmers and giving control to the rich. The development literature has been reporting this for twenty years or so. I don't speak for others, but I'm not objecting to all criticisms of the Green Revolution. Simply put, what's wrong with the Green Revolution is that the power elite seek to substitute a technological fix for a political solution; that the idea of a technological fix helps the power elite to divert attention away from the root causes of hunger and malnutrition -- i.e. class and gender relations. Reading Vandana Shiva, though, makes you think that what's wrong is technology in itself, rather than those who have social power -- be they capitalists, landlords, or powerful patriarchal men -- to make it serve their ends, rather than the ends of workers and peasants of both genders. Observe the way Shiva writes: * War And Peace On Our Farms And Tables by Vandana Shiva Director of Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, India Edited version of the speech delivered at the Women's Conference on Environment in Asia and the Pacific, 3 September 2000, Kitakyushu, Japan ...The first one, is the group of technologies that came to be known as the Green Revolution. This was not a very green transformation of agriculture, and it was definitely not revolutionary. It basically increased the control of powerful corporations and countries, and rich landlords in the Third World over food production and agriculture, displacing women and poorer peasants, and removing poor consumers from their entitlements to food ... As chemicals take over in agriculture, women are displaced, and as women are displaced they are made to look like the redundant sex. They become dispensable. A new phenomenon started in Punjab that had never taken place before, namely female feticide (killing female foetuses) * With all due respect to Shiva and her fans, it is not chemicals and technologies, be they good or bad or ugly, that increased the control of powerful corporations and countries and rich landlords; nor is it chemicals that are displacing women or causing gender-selective abortions of female fetuses. A mirror image of the power elite who have sought to offer the Green Revolution as a miraculous fix, Shiva portrays chemicals and technologies as the primary agent of negative social change, obscuring the root causes of the problems: capitalism and patriarchy. Why not fight holders of class power and patriarchal power instead? -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html * Anti-War Activist Resources: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Why not fight holders of class power and patriarchal power instead? Because Western NGOs and foundations wouldn't like you so much, and fly you around the world to preach the virtues of rootedness. Doug
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Perhaps she (Shiva) simply has wrong ideas. And if the ideas are wrong, it is best, I should think, to simply critique the ideas rather than speculate on her conscious or unconscious motives. I think it in general a bad idea (allowing for bursts of temper other personal idiosyncracies) to characterize people rather than positions. Carrol Doug Henwood wrote: Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Why not fight holders of class power and patriarchal power instead? Because Western NGOs and foundations wouldn't like you so much, and fly you around the world to preach the virtues of rootedness. Doug
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Carrol Cox wrote: Perhaps she (Shiva) simply has wrong ideas. And if the ideas are wrong, it is best, I should think, to simply critique the ideas rather than speculate on her conscious or unconscious motives. I think it in general a bad idea (allowing for bursts of temper other personal idiosyncracies) to characterize people rather than positions. I am characterizing a position - that of generally upper-middle-class Westerners who are disturbed by the vulgarity of industrial (never capitalist) society, and have a romantic longing for rootedness and place. They frequently live in places like Marin County and the Berkshires. They nominate certain spokespersons from the so-called Third World to tell them how wonderful rootedness and place are, and how dreadful industrial (never capitalist) society is. It's the contemporary version of the romantic anti-capitalism Marx wrote about in the Grundrisse. Doug
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote: I don't see at all how an alternate development of the countryside contradicts advanced industrial production. This seems like a false dichotomy. Michael, I am not sure this is true of industrial crops such as cotton, oilseeds, sugarcane etc. Maybe not. It's perfectly possible that some crops are better industrialized and some not. Or it's possible that all are better industrialized. I'd just like to see some reliable figures and causal explanations of why this is so. But just to take your first example of cotton, are we sure cotton really is an exception? Our man Roger Thurow at the Wall Street Journal (who seems to be working Mali beat) wrote an article that was posted to Pen-l a month ago that seems to suggest the opposite: Thurow, Roger and Scott Kilman. 2002. U.S. Subsidies Create Cotton Glut That Hurts Foreign Cotton Farms. Wall Street Journal (26 June): p. A1. Cotton could be a key engine of poverty reduction for Mali and nearby states, according to a joint study by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In West and Central Africa, cotton cultivation employs more than two million rural households. African cotton, much of which is hand-picked, is just as good as American cotton. The report estimates that the removal of U.S. subsidies -- which account for much of the $5 billion a year in subsidies world-wide -- would produce a drop in U.S. production that would lead to a short-term rise in the world price of cotton. In turn, that would increase revenue to West and Central African countries by about $250 million. That is a princely sum in a region where vast numbers of people live on less than one dollar a day. Instead, the opposite is happening. The new farm bill increases the amount of money a U.S. cotton farmer can count on making this year by at least 16%. At the same time, in Mali, where cotton makes up nearly half the nation's export revenue, the government is telling cotton farmers they will be getting about 10% less this year from the state cotton company. If Mali employs 2 million households in cotton cultivation -- combined with its general level of income -- it seems like it must be pretty damn unindustrialized. And yet on some level it's able to compete with the most industrialized process in the world? Or could if there were no subsidies? Doesn't that at least suggest that we can't accept at face value the claim that the industrialization of agriculture, even of non-food export crops, necessarily leads to unmatchable leaps in productivity? And mind you, this is before applying science and technology and capital to the counterfactual task of increasing Malian output within its small scale framework. So it could be that the John Henry's of agriculture are not by nature doomed. It's counterintuitive, I admit. But our intuition comes from the dominant common sense, constantly repeated. Which has turned out to be wrong at times before. I'm not saying for sure it's wrong here. I just want to hear a good defense. Michael
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote: France preserved its peasant economy along with industrial advancement in the 19th century. Marx said in the 18th Brumaire those peasants were at a cul-de-sac of history. But they were still around a century later. And then they won subsidies and they're still around today. That's a much more gradual transition to urbanization. And it doesn't seem to have been a bad thing. Yes, but there is a viewpoint which attributes the relative backwardness of French industry to the presence of French peasant economy. I'm not sure I follow. By 1970 France had certainly reached the point every developing country would like to develop to, no? Namely a rich welfare state. Its alternative agricultural path didn't stop it. It may not have been as rich in GDP/per head as America was in 1970. But its people may not have been living a worse life. The comparison at least holds open the possibility that there might be different ways to manage the transition from agricultural to industrial economy. Of course there are lots of other factors in such a comparison, like France's extreme political instability from the revolution until 1960 (in which 1848 was simply one incident), its successive military confrontations with neighbors, and the devastation of the European 30 year war between 1914 and 1945. The Indian starting conditions are extremely different in many ways and so most likely would be their desired ending conditions. So we can't prove anything by such parallels -- except that it is possible that there is more than one way to the goal. And that it is possible that maximum agricultural industrialization does not necessarily coincide with maximum rural, or national, welfare. Beyond that, like I said, I'm completely open minded and desiring to be persuaded. Michael
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak : On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote: Yes, but there is a viewpoint which attributes the relative backwardness of French industry to the presence of French peasant economy. I'm not sure I follow. By 1970 France had certainly reached the point every developing country would like to develop to, no? Namely a rich welfare state. Its alternative agricultural path didn't stop it. Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant relative backwardness of French industry in the 19th century. Compared with German industry and agriculture. Even the picture of capitalism in the 1950s that Sartre paints in his book Comminist and Peace and elsewhere is not pretty, though not due in this case due to French agriculture. Ulhas
Re: Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
A very interesting post. I assume extreme LACK of unregulation should have been extreme LACK of regulation. No? Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Ben Day [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2002 11:18 PM Subject: [PEN-L:28702] Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva) At 04:38 PM 7/26/2002 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: I completely agree with that. But to do all these things, you need more industry, and more industry means transforming the division of labor and socializing production now done in the household. You can do the good things that Kerala did, but Kerala is still poor. The only way to make India less poor is to industrialize somehow. I don't think Shiva, or her fans in the West, agree. Doug Well, Kerala was also the only Indian state, to a great extent, to successfully implement land reform. This seems to me a basic prerequisite of industrialization of any sort, but almost impossible elsewhere in India since the Congress Party - like the parties that drove independence and dominate the political landscape in so many developing countries - is inextricably bound up with landed elites. Kerala was able to carry out land reform due to the strength of its two Communist Parties (but particularly the Communist Party--Marxist, which split from the CP during independence when Stalin backed Nehru, and the rest of the CP followed the Moscow line by taking an accomodationist tack with the Congress Party), and the fact that labor unions (most affiliated witht he CPM) had great success organizing agricultural labor, particularly in the informal sector (this is a rare form of success, in any country). So, although we usually single out Kerala's welfare policies, and the debate over the Kerala model in developmental economics hinges on whether a welfare state is a viable (or more importantly, a sustainable) road to development - I think we tend to miss Kerala's real accomplishments, which involve the successful commodification of land and labor. Most developing countries have, or are gaining, at least /nominally/ capitalist relations - capitalists and wage labor. But wage labor here is embedded in despotic social relations, and extensive power inequalities, that function to tie labor to the land. Or, in Marxist terms, without effective land reform most agricultural production attempts to improve productivity by increasing absolute surplus: producers in the informal sector, facing a supine working class, and essentially beyond any meaningful regulation by the state, will tend to improve productivity through labor-squeezing tactics (driving down wages, extending the working day/week/year, etc.). With less unequal power structures governing the wage relation, with greater labor mobility, and a state presence in the labor market (e.g. the ability to enforce national minimum wages), producers are more likely compete by introducing new technologies, or other means of increasing relative surplus. Of course, neoliberals tend to target State intervention in developing countries' markets, but the bulk of most developing countries' economies are informal, and growing even more informal. The informal sector is characterized in most places by extreme LACK of unregulation - usually without even the enforcement of existing laws governing market interactions, and accepted by most neoliberal theory as fundamental for the preservation of markets. Neoliberal developmental economists have a tendancy, I think, to myopically focus on the formal sector in justifying policy prescriptions. The east asian tigers - who have had the greatest success in industralizing - were able to carry out land reform successfully due, in large part, to their top-heavy State apparatuses (the legacy of colonialism) and weak social classes - there was no landed elite strong enough to resist land reform imposed from above. But this solution is simply not viable for most developing countries, either because of the third wave of democratization, or due to a state implicated in the interests of landed elites. And even if it were, this model's reliance on fairly autonomous State control and weak social classes has its own problems of long-term sustainability. So I think Kerala presents a viable model of development from below in this respect. This doesn't exactly explain why Kerala is still poor though (and, in particular, with lower per capita income than the average in India). It's clear, though, that international markets have punished Kerala for its labor militancy, as has the national State in India. There is also the issue of time, suggested by Ulhas, and I think there's a good case to be made that Kerala is in a better position to grow than most developing states (or States) in a similar position. In any case, if any of you haven't heard of or had the chance to read Patrick Heller's _The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation
Re: Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
Ben Day wrote: Well, Kerala was also the only Indian state, to a great extent, to successfully implement land reform. Land reforms have taken place in West Bengal (Pop. 75 million), where the CPs are in power for last 25 years without a break. Land reforms have taken in other parts of India, though they have not been as thorough as Kerala (Pop. 35 million) and Bengal. This seems to me a basic prerequisite of industrialization of any sort, but almost impossible elsewhere in India since the Congress Party - like the parties that drove independence and dominate the political landscape in so many developing countries - is inextricably bound up with landed elites. The share of agriculture in India's GDP has declined from 55% in 1950 to 26% in 2000. The growth of industry and particularly services is reducing the importance of agriculture in relative terms. The Congress Party's programme was a programme of Indian industrial capital, though the mass base of Congress Party was to be found in all classes and strata of Indian society. Though services have grown at a faster rate, it is not correct to say that industrialisation has not taken place. Kerala was able to carry out land reform due to the strength of its two Communist Parties (but particularly the Communist Party--Marxist, which split from the CP during independence when Stalin backed Nehru, and the rest of the CP followed the Moscow line by taking an accomodationist tack with the Congress Party), The Indian CP split in 1964 long after Stalin's death. So, although we usually single out Kerala's welfare policies, and the debate over the Kerala model in developmental economics hinges on whether a welfare state is a viable (or more importantly, a sustainable) road to development - I think we tend to miss Kerala's real accomplishments, which involve the successful commodification of land and labor. Kerala's achievements are admirable, but other states moving in the same direction with some time lag. But then uneven and combined development is the norm everywhere. You take all India data, literacy has gone up from 18% to 65% (against 90% in Kerala) in 50 years. Male literacy is 75% on all India basis. It's due to lower female literacy (55%) that the average comes down. The lower female literacy is due to gender inequality. There is also the issue of time, suggested by Ulhas What was the population of say, Germany, when Germany began to develop industrially in later half 19 the Century? Compare that with the population of China, India and Indonesia at the corresponding stage economic development. Elimination of poverty of 2.5 billion people and of 25 million people are not comparable challenges. Ulhas
Re: Re: Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
Ulhas Joglekar wrote: What was the population of say, Germany, when Germany began to develop industrially in later half 19 the Century? Compare that with the population of China, India and Indonesia at the corresponding stage economic development. Elimination of poverty of 2.5 billion people and of 25 million people are not comparable challenges. Implicit in this is the assumption that imperialist powers, especially the USA, would tolerate India, China or Indonesia having the capacity to compete with them in the world market. My reading of history indicates that this would not be tolerated. As I tried to point out in my series of posts on Argentina, Great Britain sabotaged that country's bid to become a sovereign industrial power after WWII. If anything, dependency has deepened. Japan was the last Asian nation to try to join the imperialist club. Look at the price it paid: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In many of Ulhas's posts, I find an odd indiffererence to the global setting as if India's economic development was entirely a function of internal needs and rules. The one thing that seems obvious about the successful capitalist nations in Europe is that their economies were determined at the outset and still rely on vast holdings overseas. I find it hard to imagine India muscling its way into Latin America or the Middle East. Finally, on the question of India's rising status as an industrial power. The comparison with Germany is instructive. Germany has 82 million people but produced 42 million metric tons of steel in 1999. By comparison, India produced 24.9 million tons around the same time but with a population over 12 times the size of Germany. One website puts it this way: Although the grand total of 24.9 million MTPA places India among the top ten producers of steel in the world, the per capita steel production of only 26 Kg/person is much below the world average of 150 Kg. http://www.corporateinformation.com/insector/Steel.html So, then while India's steel production might be impressive in absolute terms--it is in the top ten worldwide--from the standpoint of capitalist modernization, it seems rather less promising. Germany's capitalist economy was able to absorb vast numbers of peasants during the 19th century, but with India and China we cannot expect the same sort of internal primitive accumulation process, can we? Furthermore, those who could not be transformed into wage earners in Germany simply got on the next boat to America. Will this be the case for India or China? I don't think so. There are already signs that the strained economies of the first world will be increasingly offlimits to immigrants, no matter Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's rather daft belief in the possibilities of nomadism. All in all, the PEN-L'ers who seem most hostile to Vandana Shiva's rather illusory brand of neo-Ghandianism appear just as committed to another kind of illusion, namely that capitalist modernization or industrialization as they put it in rather classless terms can be ultimately achieved across the board by any nation, just as a child eventually and naturally reaches puberty. My reading of history tells me that the ruling powers would rather blow up the world than allow newcomers into their club. The world capitalist system is predicated on advanced development in one sector and underdevelopment in another. Any upstart that threatens to bust down the door will soon be challenged militarily. Even if in the unlikely event that India began to catch up with the West, I doubt that the USA would accept demotion into the second tier. If India's bid to become a world industrial power is somehow connected with the emergence of the ultraright BJP, whose program is reminiscent of German and Japanese nationalist parties before WWII, our future is dim. -- Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
It was indeed - thanks for the correction. At 09:42 AM 7/28/2002 -0700, ken hanly wrote: A very interesting post. I assume extreme LACK of unregulation should have been extreme LACK of regulation. No? Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Ben Day [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2002 11:18 PM Subject: [PEN-L:28702] Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
Re: Re: Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
Thanks for the reply, Ulhas - I'm interested in drawing out the implications of the figures you give us here: At 11:13 PM 7/28/2002 +0530, Ulhas Joglekar wrote: Land reforms have taken place in West Bengal (Pop. 75 million), where the CPs are in power for last 25 years without a break. Land reforms have taken in other parts of India, though they have not been as thorough as Kerala (Pop. 35 million) and Bengal. The Communist Party Marxist (CPM) has not been in power constantly in Kerala. Coalition govs built around the Congress Party (Congress) have been swapping the seat of government w/coalitions built around the CPM for the last 50 years or so, pretty regularly every 3 or 6 years. I think the importance of the Communist parties and affiliated unions have not been necessarily their holding of office - although this is really important - but rather their grassroots strength and ability to coerce state action, regardless of who is in power. Remember - it was actually a Congress coalition that implemented land reform in Kerala, after a CPM coalition had passed it into law and subsequently dissolved. It was working class militancy in organizing the submission of land claims, and following claims up, that made land reform successful - not necessarily the passing of a land reform law. As you mention, land reform has been passed in many states in India, and we need only look to Mexico, for example, to see how insufficient this can be for effective redistribution. So I'd tend to think that the example of West Bengal supports the notion that a strong working class and viable political power not beholden to landed elites is key for effective land reform. The share of agriculture in India's GDP has declined from 55% in 1950 to 26% in 2000. The growth of industry and particularly services is reducing the importance of agriculture in relative terms. The Congress Party's programme was a programme of Indian industrial capital, though the mass base of Congress Party was to be found in all classes and strata of Indian society. Though services have grown at a faster rate, it is not correct to say that industrialisation has not taken place. You'll forgive me if I don't buy the statement that the mass base of [the] Congress Party was to be found in all classes and strata of Indian society. This either doesn't tell us much, if you mean that all classes/strata are simply represented in the Congress Party's base, or it's inaccurate, if you're implying that the various classes/strata are equally influential, equally powerful, or equally control the agenda and provide the resources and political-economic influence for the Party. I don't think, when we refer to industrialization, we mean primarily the growth of an industrial sector; or in other words, I'm not sure that your figures here for the changing distribution of production (or employment) in the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors necessarily tell us about India's level of industrialization - although this is part of the picture. The reason is that much of the employment and growth of employment in the industrial sector is still informal, i.e. in very small-scale establishments (under 10 employees), largely unorganized, and largely below the radar of State monitoring/data collection, as well as State intervention. According to the 1991 Census, only 9.3% of the 286 million main workers in India (those working at least 183 days of the year) worked in the formal sector, and only 28.2% of nonagricultural workers. The Census also shows that only 2.9% of workers and 8.8% of nonagricultural workers worked in factories. My comments about the informal sector stifling productivity-enhancing innovation or reorganizations apply equally to informal work in the industrial sector, and I think this is what Doug Henwood was getting at in emphasizing large-scale production. Although the putting-out system is production in the industrial sector, we wouldn't consider a society based on putting-out labor industrialized at all. But this is the point I was getting at: many industrialization initiatives in developing countries are actually explicit attempts to develop a dual economy and to nurture an industrial sector (which, in practice, is often just as much or more of a service sector). This isn't the same thing as industrializing the economy, though, which includes industrializing agricultural production, for which land reform is fundamental (although, I think, land reform is fundamental for much more than this). It also ignores the extremely dynamic ways in which different sectors feed off of one another in the process of development. -Ben
Re: Vandana Shiva
I am a little disappointed by the whole debate over the Article posted by Louis of Shiva's speech. First of all, like Michael, I thought most of it made a lot of sense. Anyone who has followed the experience of the 'green revolution' (sic) knows about the problems that it has produced and the fact that it has exacerbated class problems by displacing the poor farmers and giving control to the rich. The development literature has been reporting this for twenty years or so. Secondly, Marilyn Waring has been reporting on how the introduction of capitalist markets have disempowered women, again for a decade or so. I am going from memory, but if I remember her example, one of the international agencies (WB, IMF, whatever) came in and convinced east Africans that heating/cooking with dung was inefficient and unhealthy and that it was much better to heat/cook with keroscene. The problem, of course, was that keroscene had to be bought from multinational oil companies whereas dung was 'free'. The women were better off cooking with keroscene, but were much poorer and were disempowered. Moreover, they now had to produce for the export market in order to earn enough income to purchase imported oil. What bothers me most about the discussion here on Pen-l is that everyone seems to be treating this as some ideological test case. If you oppose capitalist chemical and GE agriculture you are a Luddite. If you support industrial organization of agriculture complete with chemicals, monopoly marketing and private ownership, you are somehow a socialist. In any case, as Hobsbawm has amply demonstrated, the Luddites were not against technology, they were just bargaining about the distribution of the rewards. I am sure that Vandana Shiva would not argue agains the introduction of any technology that maintained women's control of agriculture but lessened their burden. It does make me angry when a bunch of males line up to criticize her because of her defense of women's power in society. The interesting point about the Bali post is that, the introduction of machinery increasing community level productivity, consolidated the economic power of women in the community. Great. But what if a new technology *reduced* womens' status in the society? Would that necessarily by 'good'. This is not an abstract issue. In 19th century Ontario, the introduction of he cream separator and the development of cheese plants took the domestic dairy industry out of the household where it was controlled by women, into the market where it was controlled by men. I'm sure all the men on the list would think this was great. I am not sure that women would agree. The point that I am trying to make is that 1.industrialization of agriculture is not an unqualified good -- indeed it can be ecologically disasterous; and 2. the introduction of new technology can not only lead to negative class effects, but also negative gender effects at the expense of women. Shiva may be belabouring a point and appearing as anti-'progress' (i.e. 'luddite') but she has a valid point, and a point that we all should consider much more seriously than this list has so far. I admit, I am disappointed at the quality of the discussion of the issue on Pen-l. It approximates the discussion in the tabloid newspapers in Winnipeg. And that is scary. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Doug Henwood wrote: Grinding flour is a synecdoche for a society characterized by a large pesantry producing very low-tech goods in households and small villages. That style of production is inconsitent with being nonpoor. Calling it a synecdoche assumes what is to be proven: that it is impossible to make small scale farming more productive if capital, science and technology were devoted to that end. There are a million things that need to be built in the countryside: homes, road, electricity -- and a million services -- schools, hospitals, distribution of goods -- that could employ labor in an advanced division of labor that was still flexibly and locally grouped, as we see today in say home building (which has yet to be replaced with the factory production of homes, although they are getting better). Do you think it is conceptually impossible to say double or triple the productivity of subsistence farming? Which would free up labor to do those other tasks, which would be paid for with money which would buy the surplus locally produced food? While the farmers themselves would enjoy more security because in a bad year, they'd still eat, while their food would bring higher prices. I'm not an economist, but I don't see why such an alternative route is logically ruled out. Does it violate some kind of economic law of entropy? Mainstream economist would say there can't be an alternate scheme because TINA. But you can't say that. So what's your reasoning? Maybe you're right about mills. Maybe it's more profitable to sell grain and use the money to buy flour. But I'm not sure I see why that has to be true. Normal higher processing adds value and increases market power. And it would seem that leaving workers with a decommodified food source yourself should give them added market power. No? I'm not saying I have an alternative scheme. I'm just saying I don't understand the conditions of its impossibility. Especially in an era when production doesn't have to be as centralized as it once did. I'm willing to admit it's a chimera if it is. I just want to know why. Is it because you think the division of labor is the sine non qua of productivity? Maybe that's true. How would you answer the argument, of Michael Perelman and others, that synergy of inputs and outputs can be an alternate source of land productivity -- and one which an advanced division of labor removes and then has to make up for? And that this is also a source of productivity which can be improved by the application of science and appropriate technology. Michael
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak wrote: The only way to make India less poor is to industrialize somehow. Insofar as they think industrialization in any form is by definition bad for poor people, they are so stupid they're evil. iran, iraq, libya and now vandana shiva and those who might have a different theory! the axis of evil grows! thank god for the cowboys and the brown sahibs!! --ravi
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak wrote: Calling it a synecdoche assumes what is to be proven: that it is impossible to make small scale farming more productive if capital, science and technology were devoted to that end. There are a million things that need to be built in the countryside: homes, road, electricity -- and a million services -- schools, hospitals, distribution of goods -- that could employ labor in an advanced division of labor that was still flexibly and locally grouped, as we see today in say home building (which has yet to be replaced with the factory production of homes, although they are getting better). Do you think it is conceptually impossible to say double or triple the productivity of subsistence farming? Which would free up labor to do those other tasks, which would be paid for with money which would buy the surplus locally produced food? While the farmers themselves would enjoy more security because in a bad year, they'd still eat, while their food would bring higher prices. How can you have electricity or hospitals (presumably with drugs and equipment) without large-scale production, and how can you improve the productivity of small-scale agriculture without the kinds of inputs made in factories? How can a country produce these things on its own without a complex division of labor, schools, research institutes, and financing mechanisms - all of which require coordination across time and space? How can you have any of these things without enlarging the scope of action beyond the household and the village? It's just impossible. Artisanal labor can't make steel, microchips, or solar panels. Like I said before, if people don't want a society with steel, microchips, or solar panels, that's their decision, not mine. But small-scale and local production means a low level of productivity. Doug
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Doug Henwood wrote: How can you have electricity or hospitals (presumably with drugs and equipment) without large-scale production, and how can you improve the productivity of small-scale agriculture without the kinds of inputs made in factories? You can't. But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big cities in the same country. Which India already has. You don't need to depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs. They can be produced in the cities. And even in little cities, for that matter. I don't see at all how an alternate development of the countryside contradicts advanced industrial production. This seems like a false dichotomy. France preserved its peasant economy along with industrial advancement in the 19th century. Marx said in the 18th Brumaire those peasants were at a cul-de-sac of history. But they were still around a century later. And then they won subsidies and they're still around today. That's a much more gradual transition to urbanization. And it doesn't seem to have been a bad thing. Michael
Re: Vandana Shiva
At 2:16 PM -0400 7/27/02, Michael Pollak wrote: But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big cities in the same country. snip You don't need to depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs. Where do urban and suburban wage workers come from, then, if not from the depopulated countryside? Urbanization and proletarianization have always meant that former peasants and landless agricultural laborers come to cities and become wage workers, etc. The only differences have been whether the processes of urbanization and proletarianization were slow or rapid; whether the processes were organized by capitalist primitive accumulation or socialist state-led modernization; and what proportions of the formerly rural population could be incorporated into the nation's labor force as wage workers, shafted into the informal sector (petty trading, drug dealing, prostitution, etc.), or forced to emigrate to richer nations (often to remit money to support those trapped at home). There has been no exception to this historical pattern. -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html * Anti-War Activist Resources: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/
Re: Vandana Shiva and BJP Re: critiques of VandanaShiva
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: In 1998, Vandana Shiva defended the BJP's rise to power as a triumph of a populist, pluralistic, and non-discriminatory swadeshi coalition. She may have changed her mind about the BJP by now, but her poor political judgment is of a piece with her ill conceived environmental philosophy. http://www.futurenet.org/6RxforEarth/shiva.htm * My god. And that appeared in Yes!, the journal of gag positive futures, an entity founded by the dreadful David Korten. Doug
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big cities in the same country. snip You don't need to depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs. Where do urban and suburban wage workers come from, then, if not from the depopulated countryside? From the people freed from the soil, as a explained in my previous post. I'm not saying no one should be release from soil. I'm saying there is a difference between releasing 75% of them and releasing 95% of them; and that there is a difference between developing the economy so as to employ them semi-locally as opposed to dispossessing them and driving them into the cities. I think all we have here is a semantic difference, and on a literal reading of the prefix, I guess it's my fault. I was using de population to mean removal of most of the population through dispossession. You are using it to mean any feeing of the population. That cleared up, I don't think we disagree: The only differences have been whether the processes of urbanization and proletarianization were slow or rapid; whether the processes were organized by capitalist primitive accumulation or socialist state-led modernization; and what proportions of the formerly rural population could be incorporated into the nation's labor force as wage workers, shafted into the informal sector (petty trading, drug dealing, prostitution, etc.), or forced to emigrate to richer nations (often to remit money to support those trapped at home). That is the exactly the qustion. Not whether or not, but how. The question is whether a large increase in gradualism (with its attendent good effects on the welfare of the population ) could be achieved without sacrificing growth in their economic wellbeing (with its obvious bad effects on their welfare) under alternative schemes of rural development that are theoretically possible but have not yet been tried. Or whether all such courses are theoretically impossible and TINA. Also whether the 19th century American model of agriculture is superior to say the 19th century French, both in itself and as a model for a developing country. I.e, whether its greater division of labor and industrialization and export orientation, at the cost of lower per acre volume and nutritional content, and higher production of waste products and higher import needs for petroluem products, is obviously a better package deal for all concerned than its lower division-of-labor cousin. It's a question of relatives, not absolutes. As well as largely consisting at this point of historical counterfactuals and speculation about possible (alternative) futures. Michael
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Regarding the other Michael P.'s idea about the gradual release of people from agriculture, in researching classical political economy in my book, The Invention of Capitalism, I found that the old classical political economists were very much concerned that the dispossession of the people in the countryside not occur too precipitously. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Michael Perelman wrote: Regarding the other Michael P.'s idea about the gradual release of people from agriculture, in researching classical political economy in my book, The Invention of Capitalism, I found that the old classical political economists were very much concerned that the dispossession of the people in the countryside not occur too precipitously. Including people like Smith and Stewart? I thought I remember you saying they were for it because it kept wages low, and because subsistence was the biggest obstacle to getting people to submit to capitalist discipline -- with Stewart saying this overtly and Smith by omission. Am I remembering right? But perhaps they still thought there could be too much of a good thing? Michael
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Yes, they were for dispossession, but Steuart especially wanted to pace the process. On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 05:55:27PM -0400, Michael Pollak wrote: On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Michael Perelman wrote: Regarding the other Michael P.'s idea about the gradual release of people from agriculture, in researching classical political economy in my book, The Invention of Capitalism, I found that the old classical political economists were very much concerned that the dispossession of the people in the countryside not occur too precipitously. Including people like Smith and Stewart? I thought I remember you saying they were for it because it kept wages low, and because subsistence was the biggest obstacle to getting people to submit to capitalist discipline -- with Stewart saying this overtly and Smith by omission. Am I remembering right? But perhaps they still thought there could be too much of a good thing? Michael -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak: Doug Henwood wrote: How can you have electricity or hospitals (presumably with drugs and equipment) without large-scale production, and how can you improve the productivity of small-scale agriculture without the kinds of inputs made in factories? You can't. But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big cities in the same country. Which India already has. You don't need to depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs. They can be produced in the cities. And even in little cities, for that matter. Yes, there is enough surplus, unemployed labour power in Indian countryside. Some of it can migrate to the urban areas and the rest can be employed in the countryside. There is enough of it, for both urban as well as rural development. I don't see at all how an alternate development of the countryside contradicts advanced industrial production. This seems like a false dichotomy. Michael, I am not sure this is true of industrial crops such as cotton, oilseeds, sugarcane etc. The largescale manufacturing and competition (including the global competition) will have an impact on the mode of production in agriculture. e.g. Textile exports are the principal export commodity for many developing nations. The cotton cost is the most important element of cost in textile production ( The quality of cotton and the productivity/yields on cotton farms determines the price realisation for finished product and cost of cotton respectively.) The quota system ends in 2005 and there will be free global competition in textiles from 2005. The introduction of BT cotton, I suspect, is related to this scenario. France preserved its peasant economy along with industrial advancement in the 19th century. Marx said in the 18th Brumaire those peasants were at a cul-de-sac of history. But they were still around a century later. And then they won subsidies and they're still around today. That's a much more gradual transition to urbanization. And it doesn't seem to have been a bad thing. Yes, but there is a viewpoint which attributes the relative backwardness of French industry to the presence of French peasant economy. The largescale industrial capitalism requires concentration and centralisation capital. Jacobinism dosen't serve interests of the big bourgeoisie, particularly after 1848. One could even link it up (if memory serves) to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Ulhas
Re: Kerala (was Re: Vandana Shiva)
At 04:38 PM 7/26/2002 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: I completely agree with that. But to do all these things, you need more industry, and more industry means transforming the division of labor and socializing production now done in the household. You can do the good things that Kerala did, but Kerala is still poor. The only way to make India less poor is to industrialize somehow. I don't think Shiva, or her fans in the West, agree. Doug Well, Kerala was also the only Indian state, to a great extent, to successfully implement land reform. This seems to me a basic prerequisite of industrialization of any sort, but almost impossible elsewhere in India since the Congress Party - like the parties that drove independence and dominate the political landscape in so many developing countries - is inextricably bound up with landed elites. Kerala was able to carry out land reform due to the strength of its two Communist Parties (but particularly the Communist Party--Marxist, which split from the CP during independence when Stalin backed Nehru, and the rest of the CP followed the Moscow line by taking an accomodationist tack with the Congress Party), and the fact that labor unions (most affiliated witht he CPM) had great success organizing agricultural labor, particularly in the informal sector (this is a rare form of success, in any country). So, although we usually single out Kerala's welfare policies, and the debate over the Kerala model in developmental economics hinges on whether a welfare state is a viable (or more importantly, a sustainable) road to development - I think we tend to miss Kerala's real accomplishments, which involve the successful commodification of land and labor. Most developing countries have, or are gaining, at least /nominally/ capitalist relations - capitalists and wage labor. But wage labor here is embedded in despotic social relations, and extensive power inequalities, that function to tie labor to the land. Or, in Marxist terms, without effective land reform most agricultural production attempts to improve productivity by increasing absolute surplus: producers in the informal sector, facing a supine working class, and essentially beyond any meaningful regulation by the state, will tend to improve productivity through labor-squeezing tactics (driving down wages, extending the working day/week/year, etc.). With less unequal power structures governing the wage relation, with greater labor mobility, and a state presence in the labor market (e.g. the ability to enforce national minimum wages), producers are more likely compete by introducing new technologies, or other means of increasing relative surplus. Of course, neoliberals tend to target State intervention in developing countries' markets, but the bulk of most developing countries' economies are informal, and growing even more informal. The informal sector is characterized in most places by extreme LACK of unregulation - usually without even the enforcement of existing laws governing market interactions, and accepted by most neoliberal theory as fundamental for the preservation of markets. Neoliberal developmental economists have a tendancy, I think, to myopically focus on the formal sector in justifying policy prescriptions. The east asian tigers - who have had the greatest success in industralizing - were able to carry out land reform successfully due, in large part, to their top-heavy State apparatuses (the legacy of colonialism) and weak social classes - there was no landed elite strong enough to resist land reform imposed from above. But this solution is simply not viable for most developing countries, either because of the third wave of democratization, or due to a state implicated in the interests of landed elites. And even if it were, this model's reliance on fairly autonomous State control and weak social classes has its own problems of long-term sustainability. So I think Kerala presents a viable model of development from below in this respect. This doesn't exactly explain why Kerala is still poor though (and, in particular, with lower per capita income than the average in India). It's clear, though, that international markets have punished Kerala for its labor militancy, as has the national State in India. There is also the issue of time, suggested by Ulhas, and I think there's a good case to be made that Kerala is in a better position to grow than most developing states (or States) in a similar position. In any case, if any of you haven't heard of or had the chance to read Patrick Heller's _The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India_ (Cornell UP, 1999), I'd highly highly recommend it, and my comments above are basically a regurgitation of some of the theoretical backbones of his historical narrative and analysis. -Ben
Re: Vandana Shiva
Some of the criticisms seem well-informed and at least partly valid, but I have to admit that I think there are bigger enemies out there than Vandana Shiva, and a lot of what she has written seems to have merit to me. Vikash, Ulhas, and others--would Wangari Mathai be subject to similar criticisms in your view? Mat
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
And don't forget Paul Burkett's fine book. On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 06:36:01PM -0400, Louis Proyect wrote: Furthermore, you won't find anything about this in James O'Connor's journal. He has his own interpretation of the environmental crisis that has many useful insights but is not really engaged with what Marx wrote or how to extend it. This is very much the baliwick of John Bellamy Foster, whose scholarship on Marx's ecology is unequaled in my opinion. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
ken hanly wrote: Metabolic Rift. Is that Gaia with Gas from too much hog manure? No doubt the stink will drift over to some obscure journal such as Capitalism Socialism, Nature. No, it is Karl Marx's concept. Let me try this one more time: V. 3 of Capital, The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent: 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, 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. Furthermore, you won't find anything about this in James O'Connor's journal. He has his own interpretation of the environmental crisis that has many useful insights but is not really engaged with what Marx wrote or how to extend it. This is very much the baliwick of John Bellamy Foster, whose scholarship on Marx's ecology is unequaled in my opinion. -- Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
At 05:12 PM 07/26/2002 -0400, you wrote: Grinding flour is a synecdoche for a society characterized by a large pesantry producing very low-tech goods in households and small villages. That style of production is inconsitent with being nonpoor. If people want to stay poor, that's their decision. I think many wouldn't, if given the choice. Even if the food is fresher. I know that this is a complex issue. What people want, is to live! Good food, good fellowship, health, protection from natural dangersthese are not that expensive. What we have instead is a small part of humanity asphyxiating in their own glut...and the rest starving. Do people want to stay poor? Poor in what way? Given a choice between the poverty of the farmer and the poverty of the industrial worker, I think I'd choose the former; but I also think that at this point in history it's a false choice... For hi-tech to actually improve our lives (not our comfort, which is something different), we would need to be able to look at it separately from capitalism and separately from the ideology of technical progress. That would really be worth doing. Joanna
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak wrote: Again, the village mill model could work for that too. And it is true when you grind things fresh they taste a lot better. It's certainly true for coffee and spices. Grinding flour is a synecdoche for a society characterized by a large pesantry producing very low-tech goods in households and small villages. That style of production is inconsitent with being nonpoor. If people want to stay poor, that's their decision. I think many wouldn't, if given the choice. Even if the food is fresher. Doug
Re: Vandana Shiva
The only way to make India less poor is to industrialize somehow. On that we agree. Insofar as Shiva fans are indicating that there might be radically different patterns of industrialization that might be better than the dominant one, especially when it comes to farming, for the welfare of the rural poor, they may have something. Insofar as they think industrialization in any form is by definition bad for poor people, they are so stupid they're evil. Mashing lentils isn't industrialized in Manhattan either. It's something that happens after cooking, like mashing potatoes. And it's not hard. Ok then, grind flour. Again, the village mill model could work for that too. And it is true when you grind things fresh they taste a lot better. It's certainly true for coffee and spices. One of the most nose opening things you discover when you stay in a village for a few days is that a repetive diet can be deeply, completely fulfilling when everything is super fresh -- that perhaps part of why we city folk are wedded to extreme eclecticism and variety might be to make up for the relative lack of farm fresh ingredients. One of the funniest things I ever heard was from a Maronite in Galilee, a wonderful musician, who, when he heard I was from New York, said New York . . . Wow. I was there once, I played. New York is the center of music. You can hear people from everywhere there. There is better Syrian music there every weekend than I can hear here. There's just one thing. There's nothing to eat. Michael
RE: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug wrote: I thought the problem was capitalist farming, not industrial farming. I think this is something that needs to be thought through carefully. There is a long debate between those who take the position that technology itself is for the most part neutral with the problem being only what is done with it, and those whose position is that technologies often reflect the social relations (and ideology) under which they were developed and thus cannot be so simply re-applied under alternative social relations without any repercussions. If I recall correctly, Murray Bookchin, in Towards a Liberatory Technology (in POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM) takes the former position, while David Dickson in ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF TECHNICAL CHANGE takes the latter position. I think we could all think of examples of some machines that were designed to exploit workers to the fullest and result in bodily harm to operators--so that their use in a non-capitalist economy would not be sufficient, whereas we can also think of many examples of technologies that would seem to be potentially usable under alternative social relations, but anyone who thinks that the former are the exception and basically a relic of the 19th c. and the latter are the rule and characterize more recent technologies, Dickson's book should be read and his arguments and examples considered. If I had it handy I would give some examples--thy are very compelling. Mat
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Metabolic Rift. Is that Gaia with Gas from too much hog manure? No doubt the stink will drift over to some obscure journal such as Capitalism Socialism, Nature. Cheers Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 11:23 AM Subject: [PEN-L:28596] Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva As I read this it just says that small private ownership or large scale private ownership of land both are barriers to development of agriculture i.e. insofar as they are capitalist forms of agriculture.. His point is that arguing for industrial versus small scale agriculture is pointless. You might as well conclude that Marx is not in favor of small scale agriculture. The passage criticises it just as even-handedly as the industrial model. Karl Marx equals socialists. This type of sloppiness comes of reading the likes of Shiva. Cheers, Ken Hanly Marx clearly was not in favor of small scale agriculture in the sense of people like the poet Wendell Berry are (although Berry does make some useful points.) He was more concerned with the problem of the METABOLIC RIFT. His answer to this is in the Communist Manifesto: Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Pollak wrote: Hey, Shiva sets off my bullshit detectors too, but this is an unfair hit. Mashing lentils isn't industrialized in Manhattan either. It's something that happens after cooking, like mashing potatoes. And it's not hard. Ok then, grind flour. One could reconcile Shiva's love of the small scale and fresh with your emphasize on the liberatory potential of industrialization for poor villagers by simply saying that it is easy to imagine ways to make these women's lives easier by industrializing differently. Like getting each village a specialized lentil harvester, for example. Or getting local factories to turn out simple metal grinders, like butchers still use to grind hamburger, which could mash lentils as efficiently as a food processor without needing any power. And investing in improving their local schooling and transportation networks. I completely agree with that. But to do all these things, you need more industry, and more industry means transforming the division of labor and socializing production now done in the household. You can do the good things that Kerala did, but Kerala is still poor. The only way to make India less poor is to industrialize somehow. I don't think Shiva, or her fans in the West, agree. Doug
Re: Vandana Shiva
On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Doug Henwood wrote: So women should stay at home and mash lentils rather than having this process industrialized? How many lentils does Shiva mash, in between her visits to Japan and San Francisco? Or is there one rule for educated professional women, and another for uneducated peasant women? Hey, Shiva sets off my bullshit detectors too, but this is an unfair hit. Mashing lentils isn't industrialized in Manhattan either. It's something that happens after cooking, like mashing potatoes. And it's not hard. One could reconcile Shiva's love of the small scale and fresh with your emphasize on the liberatory potential of industrialization for poor villagers by simply saying that it is easy to imagine ways to make these women's lives easier by industrializing differently. Like getting each village a specialized lentil harvester, for example. Or getting local factories to turn out simple metal grinders, like butchers still use to grind hamburger, which could mash lentils as efficiently as a food processor without needing any power. And investing in improving their local schooling and transportation networks. I grant that this would require overcoming her false binaries between technology and nature. On that point, I'm entirely with you. Michael
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Pork production is localised in North Carolina? Hmm.. Ill have to inform the local citizen's groups protesting the invasion of hog barns in Manitoba. Get back to NC yea Elite and Premium Pork Corps. Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 10:14 AM Subject: [PEN-L:28575] Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva I thought the problem was capitalist farming, not industrial farming. Doug No, I meant exactly what I said. It is a function of what John Bellamy Foster calls the metabolic rift. It doesn't matter particularly where you put a factory. The same thing is not true about farms. Right now pork production is localized in North Carolina while the feed is produced in Iowa. This has had disastrous consequences for our water and for our soil and for our health. Socialism cannot simply appropriate this type of production and make it work for the common good.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
As I read this it just says that small private ownership or large scale private ownership of land both are barriers to development of agriculture i.e. insofar as they are capitalist forms of agriculture.. His point is that arguing for industrial versus small scale agriculture is pointless. You might as well conclude that Marx is not in favor of small scale agriculture. The passage criticises it just as even-handedly as the industrial model. Karl Marx equals socialists. This type of sloppiness comes of reading the likes of Shiva. Cheers, Ken Hanly Marx clearly was not in favor of small scale agriculture in the sense of people like the poet Wendell Berry are (although Berry does make some useful points.) He was more concerned with the problem of the METABOLIC RIFT. His answer to this is in the Communist Manifesto: Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Ulhas Joglekar wrote: some Western Marxist sermons Some X is Y is almost always a true statement, and for that reason is, usually, either utterly trivial or unprincipled or both. From the fact that some X is Y nothing whatever of interest about X follows. Carrol
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug Henwood : Ulhas Joglekar wrote: Doug could see my pen-l post number 26813 Why India needs transgenic crops. Thanks. I missed that first time around. Do you agree? Yes, I do ! Ulhas
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Ian Murray : Marxism has no country. It is the world outlook of the international working class. === It is? Marxism has no country, except Cuba ! :-) Ulhas
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
As I read this it just says that small private ownership or large scale private ownership of land both are barriers to development of agriculture i.e. insofar as they are capitalist forms of agriculture.. His point is that arguing for industrial versus small scale agriculture is pointless. You might as well conclude that Marx is not in favor of small scale agriculture. The passage criticises it just as even-handedly as the industrial model. Karl Marx equals socialists. This type of sloppiness comes of reading the likes of Shiva. Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 8:48 AM Subject: [PEN-L:28543] Re: Re: Vandana Shiva So women should stay at home and mash lentils rather than having this process industrialized? How many lentils does Shiva mash, in between her visits to Japan and San Francisco? Or is there one rule for educated professional women, and another for uneducated peasant women? Socialists are not in favor of industrialized farming. Karl Marx wrote: 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. I swear, sometimes she reads like Marie Antoinette in a sari. No, she reads rather like the average Frankfurt-influenced leftist who blames the world's problems on Descartes, industrialization, etc.
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Forstater, Mathew wrote: Some of the criticisms seem well-informed and at least partly valid, but I have to admit that I think there are bigger enemies out there than Vandana Shiva, and a lot of what she has written seems to have merit to me. Of course there are bigger enemies out there. But given the state of things right now, it's more imperative than ever that people on our side not be naive, obfuscating, sentimenal, or stupid. And I'm afraid there are too many who are. Doug
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
- Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 10:34 AM Subject: [PEN-L:28582] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva I also notice that some Western Marxist sermons are usually meant for Indians (or Indonesians and Egyptians). The official Marxist-Leninists states can get away with anything. Ulhas Marxism has no country. It is the world outlook of the international working class. === It is? Ian
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Ulhas Joglekar wrote: Doug could see my pen-l post number 26813 Why India needs transgenic crops. Thanks. I missed that first time around. Do you agree? Doug
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
I thought the problem was capitalist farming, not industrial farming. Doug No, I meant exactly what I said. It is a function of what John Bellamy Foster calls the metabolic rift. It doesn't matter particularly where you put a factory. The same thing is not true about farms. Right now pork production is localized in North Carolina while the feed is produced in Iowa. This has had disastrous consequences for our water and for our soil and for our health. Socialism cannot simply appropriate this type of production and make it work for the common good.
Re: RE: Vandana Shiva
Title: RE: Vandana Shiva Isn't this kinda related to a question I think should be put to US citizens, ie, who decided that it was a good idea to get rid of all those industrial jobs for better higher-value jobs. Isn't that the argment and rational behind GATT, WTO and the who neo-lib economic spin? - Original Message - From: Devine, James To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 12:43 PM Subject: [PEN-L:28560] RE: Vandana Shiva Doug: So you agree [with V. Shiva] that women rather than machines should grind flour? isn't this a false dichotomy (perhaps coming from Shiva)? Isn't there a spectrum of different techniques for grinding flour, with some more "capital intensive" than others, so-called alternative technologies? Isn't the main point that people should be given the power to democratically decide which range of technologies prevail, so that markets, corporate hierarchies, and patriarchal traditions don't dictate the answer to this crucial question? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug Henwood : I notice that Shiva's biggest fans are in the West, among people who shop at (organic) supermarkets. I also notice that some Western Marxist sermons are usually meant for Indians (or Indonesians and Egyptians). The official Marxist-Leninists states can get away with anything. Ulhas
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
I also notice that some Western Marxist sermons are usually meant for Indians (or Indonesians and Egyptians). The official Marxist-Leninists states can get away with anything. Ulhas Marxism has no country. It is the world outlook of the international working class.
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Louis Proyect wrote: Socialists are not in favor of industrialized farming. Karl Marx wrote: and No, she reads rather like the average Frankfurt-influenced leftist who blames the world's problems on Descartes, industrialization, etc. I thought the problem was capitalist farming, not industrial farming. Doug
Re: RE: Vandana Shiva
Devine, James wrote: Doug: So you agree [with V. Shiva] that women rather than machines should grind flour? isn't this a false dichotomy (perhaps coming from Shiva)? Isn't there a spectrum of different techniques for grinding flour, with some more capital intensive than others, so-called alternative technologies? Isn't the main point that people should be given the power to democratically decide which range of technologies prevail, so that markets, corporate hierarchies, and patriarchal traditions don't dictate the answer to this crucial question? Yes. I don't buy the false dichotomy at all, like I said in my last post. Native patriarchy disappears in these moral tracts - it's all the external capitalist interfering with organic prehistorical innocence. As Kabeer reports, men hate it when women get jobs. Doug
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
ravi wrote: so what is wrong with sitting at home and mashing lentils? isn't the point that the choice be available? as for shiva's point: it's unimportant whether its men who are doing it or women (she says women because they are doing it today). the point she makes is that it is preferable for men and women to sit at home and mashing lentils than to adopt industrialized processes that afford some of them the ability to fly about town or do whatever else. i see no different rule: educated professional women fly around the world to earn a living. uneducated peasant women mash lentils at home. the rule is that neither of them should have their avenue to make a living taken away. your argument and that of corporations attempting to impose industrialization on india would seem to take away this livelihood from them (the peasant women) without necessarily providing them a means to join the jetsetting educated women's class. or is the theory that the resulting abject poverty would bring about the glorious revolution? Fuck no. I thought the point was to get beyond this depressing binary of traditional life and capitalism - to use the socialization of production and technology in liberating rather than oppressive profit-maximizing ways. And the attitude among women towards capitalist employment is a lot more ambiguous than moralizing tracts a la Shiva would suggest. When I get down to the office, I'll pull Naila Kabeer off the shelf for an example. I notice that Shiva's biggest fans are in the West, among people who shop at (organic) supermarkets. Doug
RE: Vandana Shiva
Title: RE: Vandana Shiva Doug: So you agree [with V. Shiva] that women rather than machines should grind flour? isn't this a false dichotomy (perhaps coming from Shiva)? Isn't there a spectrum of different techniques for grinding flour, with some more capital intensive than others, so-called alternative technologies? Isn't the main point that people should be given the power to democratically decide which range of technologies prevail, so that markets, corporate hierarchies, and patriarchal traditions don't dictate the answer to this crucial question? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
I doubt that socialists as socialists either support or oppose, in principle, industrialized farming. It depends on ..[all sorts of things] Carrol Carrol, industrialized farming historically has meant one thing and one thing only: the introduction of chemical fertilizers, monoculture, pesticides and everything that goes along with that. There is no way that socialism can take this mode of production and turn it to the advantage of working people. That is why Marx called for an end to the metabolic rift in the Communist Manifesto, which meant the reintegration of the city and the countryside.
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
I did not pick up on that. I was looking at what she said about agriculture rather than processing. It would be hard for me to make the time today to defend what might seem undefensible, but I would say that my understanding is that people used to make a celebration of certain harvest activities -- say corn shucking (sp?). I remember when we had community gardens in Chico. Very nice experience. For a solitary woman to sit at home alone doing repetitive work -- well, that does not sound attractive. So, I guess that I would have to admit that it is utopian to sit back and compare two alternatives, one known convenient, but not very nice one, with another that I do not quite know. I my preferred demand would be for people to have the option -- not like the free press option where anyone who owns a paper ... -- to develop the sort of society that they prefer, or at least to explore the possibility of such an option. Enough of a ramble. On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 12:11:04PM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: Most of what she says in the piece Lou posted is correct, except Cargen is really Cargill. She does have a tendency to romanticize and exaggerate, but this piece seems pretty good. So you agree that women rather than machines should grind flour? Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Louis Proyect wrote: Socialists are not in favor of industrialized farming. Karl Marx wrote: I doubt that socialists as socialists either support or oppose, in principle, industrialized farming. It depends on ..[all sorts of things] Carrol
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug Henwood wrote: I swear, sometimes she reads like Marie Antoinette in a sari. Doug could see my pen-l post number 26813 Why India needs transgenic crops. Ulhas
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug Henwood wrote: So women should stay at home and mash lentils rather than having this process industrialized? How many lentils does Shiva mash, in between her visits to Japan and San Francisco? Or is there one rule for educated professional women, and another for uneducated peasant women? so what is wrong with sitting at home and mashing lentils? isn't the point that the choice be available? as for shiva's point: it's unimportant whether its men who are doing it or women (she says women because they are doing it today). the point she makes is that it is preferable for men and women to sit at home and mashing lentils than to adopt industrialized processes that afford some of them the ability to fly about town or do whatever else. i see no different rule: educated professional women fly around the world to earn a living. uneducated peasant women mash lentils at home. the rule is that neither of them should have their avenue to make a living taken away. your argument and that of corporations attempting to impose industrialization on india would seem to take away this livelihood from them (the peasant women) without necessarily providing them a means to join the jetsetting educated women's class. or is the theory that the resulting abject poverty would bring about the glorious revolution? (with apologies for the excessive posts today. last one from me). --ravi
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Michael Perelman wrote: Most of what she says in the piece Lou posted is correct, except Cargen is really Cargill. She does have a tendency to romanticize and exaggerate, but this piece seems pretty good. So you agree that women rather than machines should grind flour? Doug
Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
So women should stay at home and mash lentils rather than having this process industrialized? How many lentils does Shiva mash, in between her visits to Japan and San Francisco? Or is there one rule for educated professional women, and another for uneducated peasant women? Socialists are not in favor of industrialized farming. Karl Marx wrote: 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. I swear, sometimes she reads like Marie Antoinette in a sari. No, she reads rather like the average Frankfurt-influenced leftist who blames the world's problems on Descartes, industrialization, etc.
Re: Vandana Shiva
Most of what she says in the piece Lou posted is correct, except Cargen is really Cargill. She does have a tendency to romanticize and exaggerate, but this piece seems pretty good. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva wrote: These advanced technologies are not about feeding a hungry world. They are about seeking control over the natural world, over people, and taking away the productive capacity of women. The McKinsey Corporation, a large international consultant firm, recently produced a report, which stated that in India only one percent of food is processed. This would lead you to imagine that India, with one billion people, is merely a land of hunter-gatherers where people dig up roots and pick fruits off the wild trees. It is not, however, that 99 percent of the food is not processed, but that it is mainly processed by women at home, as our laws have so far ensured that food processing remained a small-scale activity, confined to women's cottage industry. So women should stay at home and mash lentils rather than having this process industrialized? How many lentils does Shiva mash, in between her visits to Japan and San Francisco? Or is there one rule for educated professional women, and another for uneducated peasant women? I swear, sometimes she reads like Marie Antoinette in a sari. Doug
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Lou. Check this out. http://cal.vet.upenn.edu/swine/prod/states.html#io US hog production is not centred in North Carolina but Iowa. In fact Iowa is far and away the leader in marketing. North Carolina produces many little piglets. Many are shipped to Iowa. Why? Because it is cheaper to ship the pigs to where the feed is than vice versa. Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 10:14 AM Subject: [PEN-L:28575] Re: Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva I thought the problem was capitalist farming, not industrial farming. Doug No, I meant exactly what I said. It is a function of what John Bellamy Foster calls the metabolic rift. It doesn't matter particularly where you put a factory. The same thing is not true about farms. Right now pork production is localized in North Carolina while the feed is produced in Iowa. This has had disastrous consequences for our water and for our soil and for our health. Socialism cannot simply appropriate this type of production and make it work for the common good.
Re: Re: Re: Vandana Shiva
Doug Henwood wrote: I completely agree with that. But to do all these things, you need more industry, and more industry means transforming the division of labor and socializing production now done in the household. You can do the good things that Kerala did, but Kerala is still poor. The only way to make India less poor is to industrialize somehow. I don't think Shiva, or her fans in the West, agree. I agree with this. But I think India needs at a century of sustained eonomic growth to abolish mass poverty. Consider China. Despite China's high growth rate, almost 20% of China's population (or 250 million people) survive on less than 1 $ a day. The rest live on $ 2 a day.This after 50 years of socialism. It will take sustained economic development over a long period to abolish poverty in China, India and Indonesia. Ulhas
[PEN-L:2392] Re: Vandana Shiva
At 10:44 AM 1/17/96, John William Hull wrote: Unlike Henwood, however, I'm not so sure how seriously to take all the Shiva-esque hoopla. I'm not at all convinced that many of her sort of ideas of anti-scientific rural romanticism have much influence in practical political circles. I see it more as an academic cattage industry that has little impact outside of the academy, especially on grass roots activists (much like post-structuralism). I find them to be influential, in pure or diluted form, in anti-development NGO circles and among funders. Though deep ecology and ecofeminism are reported to be at odds - DE being seen as macho (living proof: Dave Foreman) - Shiva has been embraced by to Esprit-founder Doug Tompkins' Foundation for Deep Ecology, funder of the Wildlands project, which aims to depopulate the rural western US. Tompkins also funds Jeremy Rifkin, who is not without influence. 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
[PEN-L:2398] Re: Vandana Shiva
On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, Doug Henwood wrote: I find them to be influential, in pure or diluted form, in anti-development NGO circles and among funders. Though deep ecology and ecofeminism are reported to be at odds - DE being seen as macho (living proof: Dave Foreman) - Shiva has been embraced by to Esprit-founder Doug Tompkins' Foundation for Deep Ecology, funder of the Wildlands project, which aims to depopulate the rural western US. Tompkins also funds Jeremy Rifkin, who is not without influence. Tompkins is quite influential, especially here in CA. So Doug is right that we do have something to be concerned about. Will Hull
[PEN-L:2402] Re: Vandana Shiva
At 5:53 PM 1/17/96, John William Hull wrote: On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, Doug Henwood wrote: I find them to be influential, in pure or diluted form, in anti-development NGO circles and among funders. Though deep ecology and ecofeminism are reported to be at odds - DE being seen as macho (living proof: Dave Foreman) - Shiva has been embraced by to Esprit-founder Doug Tompkins' Foundation for Deep Ecology, funder of the Wildlands project, which aims to depopulate the rural western US. Tompkins also funds Jeremy Rifkin, who is not without influence. Tompkins is quite influential, especially here in CA. So Doug is right that we do have something to be concerned about. Tompkins isn't only influential in California - he's actually moved to Chile, where he's bought up a giant chunk of the country, supposedly as an ecological preserve. Predictably this has provoked deep nationalist resentment. Chilean enviros said that whatever ecological benefit this may have is far outweighed by the degree to which he's discredited the political cause. Jeff St Clair of the Wild Forest Review says that Tompkins Foundation has the strictest "Malthusian litmus test" of all. If you want their money you have to sign onto population reduction, not merely the reduction of pop growth or zero growth. 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
[PEN-L:2376] Re: Vandana Shiva
We wrote not so much to advocate all of Vandana Shiva's ideas as to protest
the edge of sneering disrespect that sometimes emerges when someone like
Shiva is discussed. There is an unfortunate tendency among some to try and
silence through ridicule and caricature.
Peter Burns grasps the point, and makes an interesting argument about
the development of labor power, that takes Shiva's critique seriously and
creates a basis for discussion. We still find in his discussion what we
read as a certain essentializing of urban versus rural life, and an
undefended assumption that capitalist development follows a single coherent
path. We think at this point specific examples are needed to advance
discussion. In particular were curious about the idea that people, once
they've seen Paree, dont go back to the farm even if granted the opportunity.
What opportunities are we talking about? We can think of one recent
opportunity, the program for providing land to excombatants in El Salvador
as part of the peace accords, which people avoided in droves because it was
no opportunity at all, starting them off deeply in debt and facing a
structure of prices and marketing that guaranteed penury.
Henwood's reply ("Vandana Shiva Again"), which simply repeated his prior
assertions at a heightened level of rudeness, is a good example of the kind
of arrogant insularity that our last post took exception to.
In Solidarity, S. Charusheela and Colin Danby
[PEN-L:2364] Re: Vandana Shiva
A few more days have given us a chance to think about some of the other aspects of the brief Vandana Shiva discussion that bothered us. We must agree with Jacqueline Romanow that Shiva's ideas tended to be dismissed with alarming haste and vehemence. What is apparently not fully grasped by many of Shiva's readers is that she is, among other things, trying to develop a set of cultural meanings and stories to guide and inspire popular struggle. Most pen-lers would regard the work of Christian liberation theologists with respect, and admit that it has been politically effective, even if they do not agree with it. If someone says "Jesus calls me ..." we don't (or shouldn't) automatically regard her as an idiot. But if someone says "Nature calls me," the tendency is to dismiss her as a vapid new-ager (or to think she's just looking for the loo). In the context in which Shiva is working, statements about "Mother Earth" have rich and powerful cultural/religious resonance, and have been undeniably politically effective. Now that doesn't mean this work can't be criticized, or that attention should not be paid to the problematic aspects of this use of popular culture, just as one might point out that drawing on the Christian Gospels for inspiration may also strengthen the patriarchal aspects of that religious tradition. But it does not deserve contemptuous dismissal. This debate has brought out one of the less-helpful parts of the Marxian tradition, which is that, blinded by the Enlightenment, it tends to consign all cultural traditions that fall outside Enlightenment thought to the Outer Darkness of tradition, ignorance, and superstition. The 3rd world becomes a place of cultural and historical stasis (remember the Asiatic mode of production?) waiting on the platform for the train of history, which brings western capitalism, industrialization, urban culture, and so on. If the locomotive is brutal imperialism, so be it -- at least people have been rescued from stupidity and inertia. Probably nobody on the list would put it in those terms, but this is how the western Marxian tradition is widely perceived. If we may respectfully take issue with Peter Burns' thoughtful essay, the expansion of the urban informal sector in much of the third world is not caused by the magnetic draw of urban culture, but by events which have denied people the opportunity to survive in rural areas. The lived experience, material and cultural, of people in the urban informal sector is sharply different from the experience and advantages that cities offer to most of us who participate on this list. Similarly we would resist the attribution of fixed cultural meanings to industrialization. We take the point about the material advantages that capitalist accumulation _can_ provide, but would point out that for many of the world's people they have not been manifest. And one can even fall back on the Marxian tradition, in Marx's correspodence with Russian leftists toward the end of his life, to argue that there are many roads not only to socialism, but indeed to accumulation. What distresses us is that this area of debate gets collapsed into a simple contrast between a rich Enlightenment-inspired tradition of Marxian thought on the one hand, and on the other hand a mishmash of people's worst stereotypes of misanthropic Malthusians, tree-cuddling crystal-worshippers, and romantic seekers of mythical pasts. Very little opportunity is provided for activists like Shiva to draw on their own histories and cultures. Thus while we stand by our earlier posting opposing the simple romanticization of Hindu culture, we do not mean to imply that this culture is a unified dismal whole, or even a single stable, unified, and static cultural system. Hinduism has always had internal struggles over its meanings, the contestants including both conservative Brahminical hierarchs and a variety of radical movements. (The notion most westerners have of Hinduism is the conservative caste-structured one, which the British found it convenient to foster.) Vandana Shiva is working in a complex, changing, and highly-contested cultural environment, and the fact that one can find highly, brutally oppressive practices in this environment does not preclude the possibility of also finding emancipatory tropes, stories, and systems of meaning. Shiva's position, as far as we can tell, is _not_ simply that all things rural are good. And Indian culture, like any other, should not be oversimplified or glibly totalized. A final example -- and we hope she'll forgive us if we read too much into a perhaps offhand and hastily-written post -- is Gina Neff's comment on "money lending in rural, traditional Indian villages" as a sign of their backwardness. First, there is no single pattern of the "rural, traditional Indian village," and we'd like to get a clear definition of what "traditional"
[PEN-L:2365] Re: Vandana Shiva
On Mon, 15 Jan 1996, S. Charusheela and Colin Danby wrote: If we may respectfully take issue with Peter Burns' thoughtful essay, the expansion of the urban informal sector in much of the third world is not caused by the magnetic draw of urban culture, but by events which have denied people the opportunity to survive in rural areas. The lived experience, material and cultural, of people in the urban informal sector is sharply different from the experience and advantages that cities offer to most of us who participate on this list. In my original essay I explicitly granted the claim that a great many people face little option but to opt for life in an urban environment because "they are more or less driven from their traditional landholdings". But I don't think granting this claim means we have to deny the "magnetic draw of urban culture". I noted, again explicitly, that people cling to the urban consumer economy, however precariously, and that they show little desire to resume rural living and working arrangements even where these might be available to them. What drives people into cities may be different from what keeps them there. Having said that, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Charusheela and Danby's post. I am hardly in a position, as a Jesuit priest, to decry the value of spiritualities not rooted in Enlightenment values, and I would join with them in opposing the ironic dogmatizing of rationalism which sometimes infects the Enlightenment tradition. But each question must be decided on its merits (if that's not too dogmatic a rationalist formulation), and in this case, I continue to think that Marxism is closer to the truth than the Vandana Shiva view. But I doubt that Marxism itself is purely a creature of the Enlightenment, and think instead that it draws heavily upon ethical resources rooted in major pre-Enlightenment spiritual and religious traditions. This is why I think one must be very careful in interpreting the meaning and normative significance Marx gives to the "development of the forces of production". This is, as I intended to indicate in my essay, as much an emancipatory and "spiritual" notion--involving creativity and invention in the production of nonmaterial outputs such as purposeful cultural and leisure activity, improved human relations, and high quality social services--as a technological one, at least as I interpret Marx. The key force of production is human labor power itself, but this can take many different forms, and in socialist society it will not be a matter of expanding Fordist (and ecologically damaging) methods of production and outputs. Peter Burns SJ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2273] Re: Vandana Shiva
I have read both books cited by fellow PEN-L subscribers and have attended a lecture given by Ms. Shiva as well. Correspondingly, I feel I must respond to the wholesale dismissal of her work. Ms. Shiva is not so nieve to assume a broad "all that is rural is good" thesis. Instead she picks up the key threads of rural-based sustainable production and heralds them as central to an egalitarian and sustainable economy. 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. Her work is very much in harmony with the work of Marilyn Waring's "If Women Counted: A new Feminist Economics." Adding Ms. Shiva's expertise, as a scientist, in the areas of ecology and sustainable development. I am disappointed to see progressive minds so limited in their ability to absorb new ideas. Vandana Shiva is both thoughtful, critical and insightful in her work and as such, it is of much merit. If you have specific criticisms - this might lead to a more fruitful discussion. However, the limited discussion which has been offered thus far has led me to believe that there may be more truth to the caricature of the, in the words of my old labour history professor, vulgar industrial marxists, than I previously expected. Jacqueline Romanow economics department University of Manitoba
[PEN-L:2275] Re: Vandana Shiva
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
[PEN-L:2276] Re: Vandana Shiva
Jacqueline said: [deletions] 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. [deletions] If you have specific criticisms - this might lead to a more fruitful discussion. However, the limited discussion which has been offered thus far has led me to believe that there may be more truth to the caricature of the, in the words of my old labour history professor, vulgar industrial marxists, than I previously expected. i also have read her work and in general there is much to think about - especially the recognition of how nature is dying *now* and things have to be done *now* even if they do not fit into the "narrow" old style marxist view of class struggle and even might prolong the demise of capitalism. i have said it before - we have to have a world left to be socialists in later. it also relates to my arguments that i don't agree with the usual marxist view of historical transformation. i think it better to develop elements of green anti-materialist socialism while still obviously living within a capitalist economy. the more we do that the more links to the capitalist economy will be lost and it will die from irrelevance. where i do disagree with shiva is in the first paragraph above. i don't hold a view that men did this to women and nature. "instilled by men" - is rhetoric and i don't see history like that. in a superficial sense men might have held power on the boards and prior in the aristocracies. but i think capitalism has a dynamic that subjugates all of us and makes both genders "puppet like" in our behaviour. i don't look to a victim view of gender. but jacqueline's point about dinosouric "vulgar industrial marxists" hanging around pen-l is well taken. kind regards bill -- ##William F. Mitchell ### Head of Economics Department # University of Newcastle New South Wales, Australia ###*E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ### Phone: +61 49 215065 # ## ### +61 49 215027 Fax: +61 49 216919 ## WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html
