Re: Current implications for South Africa

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Lou says:

> Yoshie:
> > Let's forget about fast food as it is merely red herring in this
> > thread.
>
> Then why the heck did you and Carrol tell practically argue that opposition
> to MacDonalds is anti-working class? Surely you are aware that I read
> lbo-talk just as Doug reads the Marxism list archives. I found your
> performance around this question deeply troubling.

*****   Re: On the important French Fry Question
From: Yoshie Furuhashi (furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx)
Date: Sun Jan 21 2001 - 12:41:24 EST

> John Thornton wrote:
>
> > On another note, what the hell are you people doing
> > patronizing McD's? I suppose you shop at WalMart too?
>
> Hmm, so where's it stop? The computer I'm typing on was made a giant
> multinational and assembled in Mexico. There's a stereo next to me
> made by Sony in China. The coffee I'm drinking came from Kenya, a
> country filled with poor and hungry people, and the beans were grown
> and picked under god knows what exploitative conditions. You don't
> really believe that individual consumption choices can clean an
> unclean world, do you?
>
> Doug

By John's criteria, only the rich who can afford _not_ to eat fast
food, shop at Wal-Mart, etc. can live morally correct lives.  What
the masses buy is cheap mass products of sweatshop labor; what the
truly rich buy, in contrast, is expensive products of relatively
well-paid artisanal labor.  Haute couture & formal dining at
fashionable restaurants (or better yet, _your own personal cook_,
well compensated year-around to provide meals _at home_, to your
taste & convenience) are good examples of the latter.  Morally
correct consumption is a luxury that only those who don't & can't
count their own money can afford.

Yoshie

<http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0101/1160.html>   *****

If you agree more with John Thornton than me, that's fine, but I
think that berating people who patronize fast food joints & shop at
WalMart & the like, in the absence of requests to boycott them from
workers who either work for them or produce inputs for their goods,
is counter-productive.

>  >Is it possible to provide all human beings with food, clean
> > water, sanitation, shelter, energy, medicine, education,
> > transportation, etc. that are necessary to meet historically
> > developed minimum needs (setting aside other needs & desires for the
> > time being) under socialism?
>
> I am pretty sure that we can, but it will require *radical* adjustments
> including:
>
> 1. overcoming the city-countryside split as called for in the Communist
> Manifesto.
> 2. elimination of the automobile and jet plane except for extraordinary
> reasons.
> 3. promotion of bicycles and trains and other forms of environmentally wise
> transportation.
> 4. drastic reduction in meat eating.
> 5. sharp cutback in fashion, luxury goods like Rolex watches, Mount Blanc
> pens, overseas vacations, fancy restaurants and delicatessens--ie.
> everything that goes into a "yuppie" lifestyle. In exchange for a reduction
> in these kinds of dubious "goodies" we achieve more free time and a sense
> of relief that we are not fucking over the rest of the world.
> 6. in general, less is more as Mies van der Rohe put it.

1-6 won't solve the problem, though, if fossil fuels & clean water
are soon running out & there is no practical alternative energy
source, as Mark says.  How do you make bicycles & run trains without
fuels?

Yoshie