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 ------------------
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005