Patrick Bond wrote:
> we defend your broad
> line of argument, comrade Mark:
>
> >
So who are the neo-Malthusians now?
What Patrick Bond's paper shows is how completely the "submerged masses" of
the neocolonial peripheries are imbricated into the capitalist world-system,
connected to it by millions of threads like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput.
They ARE part of the world's working class. But what this also shows is how
*progressive* is the Malthusian-Marxist argument. We are constantly accused
of racism, obscurantism and worse by people who claim that this
Malthusian-Marxist argument is directed *against* the poor women of India,
etc. But the people themselves do not support this attack. The ordinary
people, the rank and file, do not support this attack. This is for the good
reason that the landless day-labourers of the megacities, and the
marginalised masses of rural semi-proletarians/semi-peasants of Asia and
Africa, are still on the receiving end of the "benefits" of capitalist
"progress". They know what it means. They do not need the patronising
solidarity of western intellectuals. People in the barrios, people of the
"reserve army", who feel the blows of capital's "discourse" every day on
their own backs, can only be humiliated by the condescension of privileged
westerners who live in unimaginable luxury, but who are not willing to share
anything more substantial than kind words with them (though they have that
by the barrelful). When those of us who live in the comfort of the West show
that we are seriously and in practice ready to share *their fate* and their
everyday life, then we shall earn the right to be listened to.
can surely only find
Actually, they are 'to the left of our left', and they know from everyday
life that neoliberal globalism, like earlier manifestations fo world
capitalism, does not offer them anything but more insecurity, more hardship,
more exploitation.
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