[PEN-L:28673] Re: Vandana Shiva

[Michael Pollak <mpollak@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:

> How can you have electricity or hospitals (presumably with drugs and
> equipment) without large-scale production, and how can you improve
> the productivity of small-scale agriculture without the kinds of
> inputs made in factories?

You can't.  But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big
cities in the same country.  Which India already has.  You don't need to
depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs.  They
can be produced in the cities.  And even in little cities, for that
matter.

I don't see at all how an alternate development of the countryside
contradicts advanced industrial production.  This seems like a false
dichotomy.  France preserved its peasant economy along with industrial
advancement in the 19th century.  Marx said in the 18th Brumaire those
peasants were at a cul-de-sac of history.  But they were still around a
century later.  And then they won subsidies and they're still around
today.  That's a much more gradual transition to urbanization.  And it
doesn't seem to have been a bad thing.

Michael