Richard Levins: Capitalism, hunger and health

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
[Quotes and Insights #28]

“The continuation of hunger in the modern world is not the result of an intractable problem thwarting our best efforts to feed people. Rather, agriculture in the capitalist world is directly concerned with profit and only indirectly with feeding people.

“Similarly, the organization of health care is directly an economic enterprise and is only secondarily influenced by people’s health needs.

“The irrationalities of a scientifically sophisticated world come not from failures of intelligence but from the persistence of capitalism, which as a byproduct also aborts human intelligence.”

Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press (1985)