[PEN-L:2369] Shiva, again

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

A couple of observations inspired by S. Charusheela and Colin Danby's post
on Vandana Shiva.

Shiva has criticized the claims of the Green Revolution using the methods
of scientific investigation she has elsewhere denounced as
phallo-logocentric intrusions. She is a highly educated cosmopolitan who
publishes and travels around the world preaching the virtues of a
"subsistence" economy. If subsistence is so compelling a vision of the
future, why doesn't she spend her time tending to her lentils rather than
engaging the world? While that may sound cruelly ad hominem, it does raise
the issue of an elitism lurking behind a concern for tradition and nature.

How does a "traditional" agrarian society resist the onslaught of
capitalism? If it can at all, the only imaginable mechanisms would be a
state and other forms of political organization. Can those organizations
come together and challenge capital without critically engaging science and
technology. The invocation of "values" and "magic" will cut no ice against
the onslaught of cheap commodities.

Was Cecile Jackson wrong when she wrote in New Left Review #210?:

"My feeling is that the critique of the politics and ideologies of science
should not lead to a denial of any positive impact, intentional or
otherwise, of science and technology in women's lives. It is difficult to
refute the value of, for example, immunization programmes to poor Third
World women. Technology may be male-biased but this cannot be taken to mean
that it is of no benefit to women. The domestic technologies of grain
mills, wells and piped water are certainly perceived very favourably by
poor rural women. It seems to me tha the dispossessed may well view science
and technology as emporing. As Swasti Mitter observes, 'technology reflects
the existing social relationships of power, but it would be a fallacy to
reject the advance of technology on that ground.'"

Has the idea of transforming technology from an instrument of domination
and profiteering into one of liberation been completely abandoned by the
post-Marxist left? Are the only choices between giant dams, which flood and
displace, and the embrace of tradition and magic?

Doug

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Doug Henwood
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