A good long read

[alanjjohnstone]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/08/how-the-chicken-nugget-became-the-true-symbol-of-our-era

 

Quote:

Every global factory needs a global farm: industrial, technological and service enterprises rely on the extraction of work and cheap nature to thrive. The apps on your iPhone, designed in Cupertino, California, might have been coded by self-exploiting independent software engineers, and the phone itself assembled in draconian workplaces in China, and run on minerals extracted in inhumane conditions in the Congo. Modern manufacturing relies on layered, simultaneous and different regimes of work. And in response to every act of resistance against it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again.

[jondwhite]

The title of this topic should be changed to reflect the article, but yep it is a good long read.

[Brian]

"There is little reason to imagine that climate change won’t break the modern food system. Worse, industrial food production is a breeding ground for pandemic disease, and reasoned analysis suggests that the kind of concentrated animal-feeding operations that bring us cheap meat will also bring viruses that could decimate the human population. Again, this is nothing new. Just as early-modern climate change and the plague brought about the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism, so we face a future in which climate change and a vulnerability to big systemic shocks augur a dramatic end for capitalism’s ecology."So what happened to class struggle?

[alanjjohnstone]

There are many inherent contradictions within capitalism, the production and distribution of society's wealth ie food is just one which may cause a rise in socialist consciousness to arise.It may well not be the struggle in the workplaces that sparks a socialist revolution although it more than likely be an arena for many workers to battle in but not the only one and perhaps not the main one. I think we have acknowledged in our writings that the environmental climate change may initiate a response in ways of thinking,  resistance and social change.The article does contain the concept of class struggle, as my quote in the post indicates.Indeed, it was the link between ecology, economics and workers political action that caught my notice in the first place. It contained the pertinent idea of histoical  materialism and ends with stating that the motor of change is peoples political action

Quote:

If we are made by capitalism’s ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practise new ways of producing and caring for one another together – a process of redoing, rethinking and reliving our most basic relations.

All in all, i think the book it is an abstract of could be a worthwhile read and contribution to revolutionary thought. But will it reflect a 100% the SPGB case in everything it covers…it is doubtful. 

[Author]

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