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Quotation of the Day for June 6, 2010"When individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be taken into account in the first place. When an individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with only the usual small profit, he is satisfied, and he is not concerned as to what becomes of the commodity afterwards or who are its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, care that the tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock?" - Friedrich Engels, communist theorist, in Dialectics of Nature (1883) on environmental degradation. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch09.htm] Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk Jun. 2, 2010 |
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