At 11:59 AM -0400 10/13/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
Doug asks:
I'm curious what PEN-Lers think a socialist or other variety of
"progressive" government should do in a mostly poor, rural, peasant
society. Promote education and industrialization?
Wouldn't that
undermine the economic and social bases of existing life?
as Bill says, consult the people.
Well of course. But if we're seriously worried about mass poverty in
the "Third World" - the 2 billion living on <$2/day by the World
Bank definition & count - then that means raising productivity and
incomes. Raising productivity and incomes means education,
technological development, and the disturbance of existing social
structures.
Of course, we leftists are, first of all, in the business of
disturbing existing social structures, in the sense of expropriating
the expropriators, whether or not expropriation leads to any rises in
productivity and income in the short term.
--
Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
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<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
