Re: Re: Cuban Genetic Engineering (was Jesse Lemisch)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >
> Farming without industrial inputs & equipment tends to be very
> labor-intensive, often involving back-breaking labor for tilling,
> sowing, weeding, watering, & harvesting.

Speaking of what will be the nature of post-revolutionary agriculture
seems on the whole to me to be an extreme case of trying to write
recipes for the cookshops of the future. We simply can't know. As a sort
of casual footnote to this point of Yoshie's I will mention that after
54+ years I still remember as one of the most horrible days of my life
(worse than the day I broke my hip or the day I broke my wrist or any of
the days in basic training or in a factory working a nine hour day or my
experience of whooping cough or my first day in the polio ward) was a
day I spent planting strawberries on a very primitive strawberry
planter. There is a lot to be said for any and all efforts to get rid of
pesticides. Applying them can be a rather miserable experience. I
suspect most romanticizations of farming and getting close to the soil
come from those who never had the misfortune of actually living close to
the soil.

Even from a long range perspective, eliminating the difference between
city and country means industrializing (citifying) the country as well
as 'ruralizing' the city.

Carrol

  Peasants & agricultural
> workers themselves would benefit from & probably desire labor-saving
> technology in the absence of fear of unemployment.
>
> Yoshie