Re: RE: Re: Cuban cows

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Lysenko is relevant, as I've been informed by a friend who's an expert on
>Soviet agriculture, because Lysenko became popular since he proposed a quick
>technical solution to a serious political-economic problem. Cuban's problems
>are completely different than those of the Stalin-era USSR, but there are
>similarities. Should any country's president really be micro-managing
>agricultural technology? Of course, Castro is being swept up in the
>world-wide cloning (and anti-cloning) fad. He's not alone.
>JD

I don't know whether Lysenko's reputation revolved around quick, technical
solutions. I was under the impression that he was infamous for quackery
under pressure from Stalin. For example, he claimed that wheat plants
raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is
equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes. As
far as Castro "micro-managing", I am under the impression from the WSJ
article that he is doing any such thing. Mostly he seems to be "motivating"
the project as we used to say in the SWP rather than squinting through
microscopes.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org