File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-08-17.000, message 188


Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 22:59:20 +0700
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones)
Subject: re:overproduction crisis, a sf view


"prices cannot be maintained at a high level unless production is
restricted. A campaign was begun for voluntary restriction of the area
under cultivation (particularly in the USA); bonuses wre paid for reduction
in cultivated areas ....In 1933, 24,700,000 acres of ripe cotton was
ploughed under in the USA. In Brazil ten million bags of coffee...are
burned, dumped into the sea or used as toad construction material every
year.  Tea is not gathered; rubber trees are not tapped. Wholse shiploads
of oranges were dumped into the sea in London. Five million hogs were
bought by the US govt and destroyed in the autumn of 1933. In Denmark,
1500cows were slaughtered weekly and converted into fertilizers....All this
is happening at a time when millions upon millions of unemployed and their
families are starving and are clad in rags" E Varga, The Great Crisis, 1934

Marx argued in the third volume that production comes to a halt long before
social needs are met.  The danger here is that communism could be reduced
to a mere quantitative increase in production, not as a qualitatively
different society.  But there is no reason denying that under capitalism we
cannot deploy our capacities--including those which have historically
developed--to meet our equally historical needs.  

Also, according to J Sakai in Settlers: The Mythology of the White
Proletariat, land in the South was not taken out of cultivation in order to
boost prices. Sakai's argument is that landowners obtained enough insurance
from the fed govt to kick black sharecroppers who may attempt land seizures
off the land. Well, for whatever reason the evictions occured, Black people
were hoarded into strategic hamlets in the North--the so-called ghettos
that now inspire the science fiction of robocops and bladerunners. 

Is it science fiction or is it...capitalism?
d jones



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