<자본주의의 병적 징후들>  상반기 강독강좌 안내 및 참가 신청

연구공동체 건강과대안은 『자본주의의 병적 징후들』강독강좌를 시작합니다. 2018년 상반기에 진행되는 이번 세미나는 5월 3일을 시작으로 매주 목요일 저녁에 진행되며 총 6강으로 마련됩니다. 매 강의마다 강사진의 해설 강의 후 텍스트 중심의 토론 수업으로 진행될 예정입니다. 강독강좌로 진행되는 세미나 자리인만큼 참가자들은 텍스트를 충실하게 읽고 오셔야 한다는 점, 미리 공지 드립니다.

○ 일시 : 2018년 5월 3일부터 매주 목요일 저녁 7시

○ 장소 : 건강과대안 세미나실 (서울특별시 성동구 성수일로 39 (2층 연구실)

○ 강독강좌 순서

 1강) 건강, 보건의료 그리고 자본주의  (5월 3일)

- 강의 교재 : 자본주의의 병적 징후들 (서문 – 1장)

2강) 불평등과 건강 그리고 의료의 본질 (5월 10일)

- 강의 교재 : 자본주의의 병적 징후들 (2, 3장)

3강) 보건의료산업의 자본 축적과 의료의 질 (5월 17일)

- 강의 교재 : 자본주의의 병적 징후들 (4장)

4강) 의료마케팅과 건강 개념의 재정립 (5월 24일)

- 강의 교재 : 자본주의의 병적 징후들 (5장)

5강) 유럽 보건의료 제도의 시장화와 미국의료 (5월 31일)

- 강의 교재 : 자본주의의 병적 징후들 (6장, 7장)

6강) 캐나다 의료 노동 통제권 투쟁을 통해 본 병원 작업장의 모순 (6월 7일)

- 강의 교재 : 자본주의의 병적 징후들 (8장)

※ 참가비는 따로 없습니다만 저녁식사를 대신할 수 있는 소정의 다과비(약 5천원)를 서로 나누어 부담합니다.

※ 문의 : 02-747-6887 / email : healthcommune@gmail.com

※ 참가 신청하기 하기

캐나다 토론토에 소재한 요크대학교에서 정치경제학을 강의하다가 현재는 정년 퇴임을 한 맑스주의 정치경제학자 로버트 앨브리튼(Robert Albritton) 교수가 2009년에 펴낸 [Let Them Eat Junk : How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity] 목차와 인터뷰입니다.

로버트 앨브리튼 교수는 자신의 아내가 토론토에 소재한 라이슨대학교(Ryerson University)에서 식품영양학 교수로 강의하고 있기 때문에 자본주의 체제의 식품산업에 관심을 가지게 되었다고 합니다.

그는 최근 [Socialist Register](Vol 46)에 “비만과 굶주림 사이에서 : 자본주의 식품 산업(Between obesity and hunger: the capitalist food industry)”이라는 아래와 같은 글을 기고하기도 했습니다.

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Socialist Register, Vol 46
     
Between obesity and hunger: the capitalist food industry
Robert Albritton
 
http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/6770

Abstract

We live in a world capable, in principle, of providing a diverse and healthy diet for all, and yet one quarter of its people suffer from frequent hunger and ill health generated by a diet that is poor in quantity or quality or both. Another quarter of the world’s population eats too much food, food that is often heavy with calories and low on nutrients (colloquially called ‘junk food’). This quarter of the world’s population risks diabetes and all of the other chronic illnesses generated by obesity. Study after study in recent years has come to the conclusion that the single most important factor in human health is diet, and diet is something we can shape.
Cheap food is important to capitalism because it allows wages to be lower (and thus profits to be higher) and yet leave workers with more disposable income available to buy other commodities. In this short essay most of my examples come from the US, because, as the most hegemonic capitalist power in the world, it has done the most to shape the global food system. But I don’t want to give the impression that there is one tightly integrated capitalist world food system. Even in the US, capitalism has not entirely subsumed the whole food system, and while there are few places in the world untouched by capitalism, its degree of hegemony may vary a great deal. Still, up to the present, capitalism has been the single strongest force shaping the global food system, and much of that shaping power has flowed outward from the US.

=======================

Let Them Eat Junk : How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity
Robert Albritton / Pluto Press / 2009

A thorough explanation of how the capitalist system creates simultaneous hunger and obesity
 
This is the first book to analyse the food industry from a Marxist perspective.Respected economist Robert Albritton argues that the capitalist system, far from delivering on the promise of cheap, nutritious food for all, has created a world where 25% of the world population are over-fed and 25% are hungry. This malnourishment of 50% of the world’s population is explained systematically, a refreshing change from accounts that focus on cultural factors and individual greed. Albritton details the economic relations and connections that have put us in a situation of simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food.This explosive book provides yet more evidence that the human cost of capitalism is much bigger than those in power will admit.

 
Table of Contents

Preface
1 Introduction
2 Capital’s Deep Structures, Agriculture, and Food
3 The Phase of Consumerism and the Roots of the Current Agriculture and Food Regimes
4 The Food System and Consumer’s Health
5 The Health of Agriculture and Food Workers
6 Agriculture, Food, and the Environment
7 Food, Marketing and Choice
8 Food, Power, and Liberal Democracy
9 Possible Changes That May Become Feasible Changes
Notes
Index

=========================

Capitalism and food: Let them eat junk

An interview with Rob Albritton

출처 : http://links.org.au/node/1616

March 2010 — Rob Albritton’s Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity (2009), published by Arbeiter Ring Press in Canada and Pluto Press in the UK, offers a welcome and urgently needed analysis of “how the profit fixation of capital has led us deeply into a dangerously unsustainable system of food provision, a system that totally fails when it comes to distributive justice and to human and environmental health” (p. 201). His analysis takes us inside capitalism and shows how its “deep structures” manage our agricultural and food systems in irrational ways.

Socialist Project’s Relay magazine recently asked John Simoulidis to interview Robert Albritton about his book and current global struggles to address the failures of our agriculture/food system. Posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission.

* * *
You have written a number of books on Marxist theory and political economy: why a book on food?

When I retired from York University’s political science department after teaching political theory and political economy for 36 years, I had more time to do research and writing. Previously most of my work was very theoretical, and I decided it was time to direct my attention to something more down to earth.

I had many influences directing my attention toward food, not the least of which was my wife’s career teaching food and nutrition at Ryerson University in Toronto. Now that I was retired, I could devote most of my waking hours to researching and writing this book on the food system – a topic that turned out to be far more extensive than my initial expectations. Indeed, the more I researched the topic, the more I discovered the numerous interconnections among our ecological crises, our social and physical health crises, our economic crisis and our global food system.

The focus on the impact that capitalism has on food and agriculture is a particularly rich source if we want to make connections between the struggles for socialism and the struggles for ecological sustainability. I hope my book can contribute to a growing wake-up call that will bring about a refocus of human intelligence and material wealth toward reshaping the food system and the capitalist economy that it is embedded in.

There are various and recently published books and articles offering critiques of the corporate control of the food system. What can readers expect to find in your book that is lacking in other critiques?

After 40 years of studying capitalism, I believe that no single work makes more headway in grasping its inner logic and inner dynamic than Marx’s Capital. It was this work more than any other that guided me in my central aim, which was to understand how capitalism has shaped our food system.

It follows that the first difference between this book and others written on the topic of food is that I am not aware of any other food book that explicitly bases its theoretical framework (many do not have theoretical frameworks) on Marx’s Capital. Second, no other food book has as broad a scope as this one. Third, no other food book has as much factual information. Fourth and finally, the above three points are combined in a way that makes this book the most radical critique of the capitalist food system yet written. This is because it seeks out connections between the food crisis and the other crises of advanced capitalism, and it illustrates that capital’s indifference to use-value is particularly destructive when capitalism subsumes and commodifies the food system.

What were some of the most interesting and/or surprising discoveries you made while researching and writing this book?

I was shocked by many things. I’ll mention a few.

First, I was impressed by the immense power of the sugar industry. Sugar is one of the cheapest, the most addictive and most profitable of food inputs. As a result more and more of it goes into much of our processed foods, even though it is the prime suspect in the current global diabetes epidemic. Efforts to place constraints on its use have mostly failed, despite a fledgling international “dump soft drinks” campaign led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Second, while I knew in a general way that the global distribution of food leaves many people struggling with hunger and malnutrition, I was not aware that globally nearly half the population makes $2 or less a day, and that approximately 1 billion people are mentally impaired due to malnutrition.

Finally, our food system spreads toxins in the environment; has played the major role in deforestation, the running down of water supplies and the degradation of land; is a huge contributor to global warming; and is rapidly depleting the remaining reserves of fossil fuels. In short, it not only undermines human health, but also is leading us toward ecological disaster.

What are some of the major themes that you address? What are some of the major failures associated with an agricultural/food system controlled by capital’s “deep structures”?

The title could be misleading without an understanding of the reference to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake.” In my interpretation “junk food” epitomises capitalist food in this phase of history, and junk food is high in sugars, fats and salts, while being low in other nutrients. My book does not focus narrowly on junk food, but on a food system whose cutting edge has been junk food and whose largest corporations tend to be centred in the US, expanding outward to the rest of the world. The main themes of the book are the food system’s failure to advance human health, environmental health or social justice; and the connections between the food crisis and the myriad of other crises characteristic of late capitalism.
Rational behaviour under capitalism requires that capitalists continually shift production from goods and services that are unprofitable (and will, in due course plunge them into bankruptcy) to goods and services that are profitable. Since competition forces them to maximise short-term profits, it is this quantitative focus and not the quality of use values that becomes the overriding goal.

For example, if a capitalist learns that by adding more sugar to baby food, profits will increase both because sugar is a very cheap input and because babies will eat more baby food and later adults will eat more sugar, then a rational capitalist would do this, despite many studies that show a craving for sugar that borders on addiction can be established very early in children through a diet of sugar dense foods.

The capitalist cannot afford to be concerned with the lifetime of obesity and connected illnesses that such a diet might generate. In short, in order to be rational, a capitalist needs to focus on profits (quantity) and not the quality of life of humans (or use values) unless that quality can be easily converted into profits. Similarly, if the market for palm oil is profitable, and the easiest way to expand its production is to cut down the remaining rainforests of South East Asia, then a rational capitalist would not hesitate to do this.

Finally, if capitalist farmers profit from paying low wages to undocumented field workers, then any capitalist farmer who does not do this is likely to lose out to the competition. Unfortunately these and many other destructive trends are all too current.

How does the crisis in the food system relate to the broader economic and ecological crises of the current phase of neoliberal capitalism? How will its impacts be felt and distributed globally?

The food crisis feeds the other crises which in turn feed it. The North American food system is so dependent upon fossil fuels that it has been estimated that all known fossil fuel reserves would be exhausted in seven years were the whole world to adopt the US system. Indeed, at approximately one-third of the total, the food system contributes more to global warming than any other sector of the economy. At the same time global warming will reduce crop yields due to extreme weather and higher temperatures.

Further, to mention only two of the many causes of pollution: the massive petrochemical inputs of agriculture coupled with the pollution of bodies of fresh water by confined animal feeding operations make the capitalist food system a major contributor to the toxification of the environment, which is now reaching alarming levels.

Finally, given the petroleum dependency of the food system, the price of food will go up with the price of petroleum, and the use of food crop land for ethanol production will only push food prices yet higher. Declining yields due to global warming and extreme weather will also increase food prices. Without action now these price increases will soon be disastrous for the 40 per cent of global population that lives on $2 or less a day.

Your reply addresses how capitalism creates hunger. Can you explain how it at the same time produces obesity?

The producers of junk food that profit from the ease with which people become quasi-addicted to sugar, fat and salt provide consumers with lots of calories but few nutrients. Hooked on junk food and lacking the income to afford more nutritious food, people consume too many calories and not enough nutrients. This is a recipe for obesity, a weakened immune system, and ultimately illness and death. A report published by the American Medical Association claims that if current practices continue, one-third of US children born in the year 2000 will get diabetes.

Even more serious than what some have called the “pandemic of obesity” is the hunger and malnutrition suffered by over a billion people in the world. It has been estimated that during each half hour an average of 360 children under the age of five die of starvation or hunger-related illnesses.

Perhaps the most challenging part of your book for readers not familiar with Marx’s Capital or the Unoist approach that informs your theoretical work concerns the two chapters in part 2 of your book where you provide an outline of “capitalism in the abstract and general” and “consumerism” as a phase of capitalism. Can you elaborate briefly on why this kind of theoretical work is necessary in order to understand the global and local failures of the agriculture/food system?
The more abstract level of analysis clarifies the basic features of fully developed capitalism: showing how it subsumes social relations while deepening and expanding itself.

Capital’s abstract dynamic is present in history to the extent that capitalism is. At the same time capital is constrained and/or supported by historically specific structures and agencies that shape it and are shaped by it. The abstract level of analysis brings out the reasons why even when capitalism is functioning at its competitive best, its management of a fully capitalist agricultural/food system is likely to manifest significant contradictions and irrationalities. My mid-range level of analysis illustrates the form that these irrationalities take in the phase of consumerism after World War II. Finally, these two higher levels of analysis help us to understand the evolving food system over the past 20 years or so.

One can easily list large numbers of alarming facts about current tendencies associated with the capitalist food system, but theory helps us to weigh the importance of the facts, to understand their interconnections, and hence to understand the most important forces shaping and being shaped by the food system. The better we understand how the current system operates, the more effective our strategies of transformation.

You describe the current phase of capitalism in terms of a “capitalist command economy”. Can you briefly explain what this means and how it frames the issues you raise in the concluding chapter of your book on “the fight for democracy, social justice, health and sustainability”?

The food industry always emphasises the enormous choice it offers the modern consumer, but this is an illusion.

First of all because most people in the world are too poor to buy any but the cheapest of foods. Second, those that have the money are confronted with a huge array of processed foods that are largely re-arrangements of soy, corn, fat, sugar and salt. If you are allergic to GM soy, you will have to avoid the majority of processed foods since so many of them contain soy and soy by-products, and there is no labelling requirement for GMOs. Third, food indoctrination is so widespread and powerful that most food choices are already heavily conditioned by the toxic food environment and its powerful marketing techniques. Fourth, nearly all foods in the typical supermarket are the products of a few huge corporations (for example, Nestlé and Kraft).

During the “Cold War”, Western economists often sharply contrasted “totalitarian command economies”, characteristic of the communist bloc, with “free market economies”, characteristic of the capitalist bloc. Today, the world capitalist economy ought to be labelled a “corporate command economy” because large corporations run by small elites have way too much unaccountable power to command the future of humanity.

Markets are now largely planning instruments utilised by corporations for creating both supply and demand. Large profits are made even when much larger social costs (externalities not included in market prices) will need to be paid by taxpayers and future generations.

While in reality most markets have never worked as pictured by the ideal of optimality that many economists have presupposed, now this ideal is so deeply ingrained that it can still be used to justify “free markets” when in reality we more and more see the corporate use of markets as planning mechanisms to maximise their short-term profits while creating huge long-range costs to society. These social costs can be viewed as debts that future generations will have to pay whether they are economic debts, ecological debts or health debts.

We need to turn this around, and we need to do it fast. This will require clearing our minds of the free market myth, so that we can begin to consciously use markets as democratic planning mechanisms to advance human and environmental wellbeing. Besides democratising markets, we also need to democratise corporations and governments. Democratising corporations means making their decision making transparent so that they can be held accountable by the public. The first step in democratising governments is to find ways of preventing them being held for ransom by giant corporations.

In the current circumstances, it is particularly important to democratise the labour market. There will always be unmet social needs, and therefore there should always be jobs to meet those needs. Existing labour markets are extremely ineffective ways of mobilising human energies to meet human needs. Computer technology could be utilised to find new ways of prioritising social needs and of mobilising the human intelligence and material wealth to meet them. Anyone who wants to work and is able to work should never be unemployed unless it is to gain skills needed to meet particular needs, and such education should be subsidised.

Finally, and this will perhaps be the most difficult, we need to find ways to redistribute wealth globally in order to advance the equality that is necessary for democracy to be effective, and for freedom to have any meaning. Democratising markets, corporations and governments is, in my opinion, not a “middle way” that compromises its soul to neoliberalism, it is the best way forward that I can think of – a way that offers a just and humane way out of the myriad of crises that confront us.

[Rob Albritton is professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the author of Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx (2007) and contributed an article to the recent issue of Socialist Register (2010), “Morbid symptoms: Health under capitalism”. This article first appeared in the January-March 2010 edition of Relay, Socialist Project’s magazine. It is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission. To download a PDF of the latest edition Relay click HERE.]

21세기 전염병의 자화상

아르헨티나 4.5, 코스타리카 2.9, 에쿠아도르 2.5, 오스트레일리아 0.1 미만…. 이 숫자들은 겨울을 난 지구 남쪽 국가들의 신종플루 사망률이다. 아르헨티나는 환자 100명 중 4.5명이 사망했고 오스트레일리아는 1000명 중 한 명도 사망하지 않았다.

이번 겨울이 지나면 북반구의 국가들까지 포함하여 전 세계 나라들의 성적표가 사망자 수와 사망률로 드러날 것이다. 남반구 국가들은 아직 신종플루 백신이 생산되기 이전의 성적표였던 반면 북반구에서는 백신이 있는 나라와 없는 나라가 나뉠 것이므로 각국의 명암은 더욱 뚜렷해질 가능성이 크다.

그런데 이번 겨울에 예방 접종을 받을 수 있는 사람은 전 세계에서 몇 명이나 될까? 북반구에서 올해 8월까지 백신 생산 주문을 한 것이 대체로 10억 회 분량 정도다. 짐작하다시피 거의 대부분을 북반구의 부국들이 주문했다. 일례로 미국의 경우 계절 독감 백신의 주문량은 1억 회 정도였지만 이번의 대유행 독감 예방 백신의 경우 2억5000만 회분을 주문했다.

그리스, 네덜란드, 캐나다, 이스라엘은 인구 전체가 2회 접종할 수 있는 분량을 주문했고 다른 국가들도 인구의 30~78%가 2회 접종할 수 있는 분량을 주문했다. 조류독감의 경우 치사율이 60%였으니 선진국들이 준비를 철저히 한 것도 무리가 아니다. 그러나 10억 명을 제외한 58억 명은 백신과는 관계가 없다.

다행인 소식도 있다. 2회 접종을 해야 할 것으로 알려졌던 백신이 18세 이상 성인과 10세 이상 어린이들에게 있어서는 1회 접종만으로도 예방이 가능할 것이라는 임상결과다. 또 9월 21일 세계보건기구 사무총장 마가렛 챈이 밝힌 바에 따르면 대유행 인플루엔자 예방 백신이 2010년까지 내년까지 약 30억 개가 생산될 수 있을 것이라고 한다.

그러나 이것이 다행일까? 30억 개가 생산가능하다는 것은 2009년이 아니라 2010년이다. 그리고 생산이 가능하다는 것과 실제 주문 생산된다는 것은 전혀 별개의 이야기다. 벌써부터 내년에는 선진국들의 주문이 대폭 줄 것이라는 이야기도 나온다. 또 2회가 아니라 1회가 된다 한들 선진국들이 백신을 후진국에 기부하기보다는 자국 사람들이나 선진국 사이에서 재분배될 가능성이 훨씬 크다. 지금까지 기부물품으로 나온 백신이 오직 300만 개, 즉 전체 생산량의 0.3%도 안 된다는 것만 보아도 충분히 짐작할 수 있다.

결국 지구의 68억 인구 중 백신이 가장 필요한 사람들. 즉 선진국을 제외한 나머지 나라의 국민 대다수는 백신은 구경도 못할 것이다. 전 세계 인구의 50%가 하루 2.5달러 미만으로 살고 있는데 신종플루 백신 가격은 최소 10달러가 넘는 현실에서 이는 충분히 예상 가능한 일이기도 하다.

반면 다른 한편에서는 수조 원의 이익을 내는 기업들이 있다. 백신 독점 생산 기업의 하나인 글락소스미스클라인(GSK)은 지금까지 3억4100만 개의 신종플루 백신을 주문 받았다고 한다. 이는 계절독감 수준의 가격으로만 계산해도 3조 원이 넘는 돈이다(실제로는 5조 원이 넘을 것으로 보인다). 제약회사 하나가 신종플루로 번 돈이 이 정도다.

전 세계 백신 생산은 사노피-아벤티스, 아스트라-제네카, GSK, 등 몇 개 제약회사의 독점 영역이고 다섯 개 회사가 전체 물량의 80% 이상을 공급한다. 이들의 주가는 요즘 그야말로 하늘 높은 줄 모른다.

이러한 사정은 항바이러스제에서도 마찬가지다. 조류독감의 치료제이고 이번 신종플루 치료제이기도 한 타미플루의 독점 판매권을 가진 로슈는 2004년부터 이 약을 지금까지 2억7000만 명분을 팔았고 올 한해에 예상되는 매출액만 2조 원이 넘는다. 그런데 이 대부분의 항바이러스 치료제도 백신과 마찬가지로 선진국들이 비축했다. 대부분의 선진국들이 인구의 30~80%를 비축한 반면 나머지 국가들은 비축은 엄두도 못낸다.

물론 선진국의 대다수 국민들은 로슈가 올리는 천문학적 이윤과 어떤 관련도 없다. 타미플루만 하더라도 독점 판매권은 로슈가 가지고 있지만 그 특허권은 길리어드라는 회사가 가지고 있다. 그 길리어드의 전 대표이사는 우리가 잘 아는 부시 정권의 럼스펠드 전 국방부장관이다. 길리어드의 잘 알려진 주주로는 레이건 정권의 슐츠 전 국무장관과 그 부인도 있다. 그리고 이 길리어드는 로슈 판매액의 10%를 받는다.

이 럼스펠드가 국방부장관 시절에 조류독감 치료제로 전 세계 미군을 위한 타미플루 구입을 지시했으니 조류독감이나 지금 신종플루에 대해 인도네시아 보건부 장관이 제약회사가 질병을 만들어 퍼뜨렸다고 음모론을 펴는 것도 무리가 아니다. 신종플루로 몇 개 다국적 기업과 소수의 권력자들이 떼돈을 버는데 다른 한편에서는 비싼 약값으로 약을 구경도 못하게 생긴 상황에서 어떻게 음모론이 나오지 않겠는가.

20세기의 대부분의 시기 인류는 전 세계적 전염병에 대해 개인적 위생과 사회적 격리라는 두 가지 기본적 방법으로 대처해왔다. 빈곤과 흉작, 전쟁이 겹치는 상황에서 개인 위생이나 사회적 격리라는 고전적인 방법만으로는 역병을 막을 수가 없었고 1918년 스페인 독감 시기에 인류는 5000만 명 이상의 생명을 역신에 제물로 바쳤다.

그러나 지금은 21세기다. 현대 의학은 최소한 백신과 치료제, 그리고 환자들을 치료하는 병원을 중심으로 하는 치료의학을 발전시켜왔다. 천연두나 소아마비 등은 이러한 방법으로 사실상 사라진 질병이 되었다. 그러나 지금 세계의 상황은 어떤가? 이번 신종플루만 보더라도 전 세계 인구의 80% 이상이 사실상 현대 의학의 가장 중요한 성과중 하나인 백신과 치료제의 혜택을 전혀 받지 못한다. 백신이 없어서도 치료제가 없어서도 아니다. 또 2005년부터 UN이 준비했으므로 시간이 부족했던 것도 아니다.

신종플루만이 아니다. 지금 세계에서는 약이 없는 것도 아닌데 매년 1000만 명이 전염병으로 사망한다. 에이즈로 300만 명, 결핵으로 200만 명, 말라리아로 100만 명이 사망한다. 이들 중 반이 넘는 수는 어린이들이다. 홍역으로 폐렴으로, 또 설사로 아이들이 죽는다.

HIV/에이즈문제를 보자. 에이즈는는 과거처럼 걸리면 죽는 병이 아니다. 고혈압이나 당뇨처럼 치료만 하면 오랫동안 정상적인 생활을 할 수 있는 병으로 바뀐 지 오래여서 미국 에이즈환자의 발병 후 평균여명은 지금 24년 정도다. 그런데 전 세계 HIV 감염자의 70% 이상이 있는 아프리카의 에이즈환자 중 적절한 치료를 받는 사람은 0.1%도 안 된다.

사하라 이남 아프리카 인구 중 절반 가까이가 하루 1달러 미만으로 산다. 그런데 에이즈 치료제의 약값은 1달에 최소 800달러 이상이다. 이들에게 다국적 제약회사의 에이즈 치료제는 그야말로 그림의 떡이다. 똑같은 약제가 인도에서 수입되면 20분의 1이다. 특허권 때문이다. 특허만 없어도 당장 죽어가는 1000만 명을 살릴 수 있다.

세계무역기구(WTO)가 그토록 강조하는 무역 관련 지적재산권 협정에서 특허는 20년 동안 존속한다고 해놓았고 이 때문에 지구 한편에서는 1년에 1000만명이 죽고 다른 한편에서 럼스펠드와 같은 제약회사의 극소수 주주들은 1년에 수백조 원씩의 이윤을 얻는다. 이것이 21세기의 전염병의 자화상이다.

이번 추석에 신종플루는 가장 많이 이야기되는 주제 중 하나일 것이다. 신종플루를 둘러싼 한국의 상황도 한심하긴 마찬가지다. 한국 정부는 몇 년간의 시간에도 아무런 준비도 하지 않았고 더욱이 문제가 심각해진 올해 4월 이후에도 백신과 항바이러스제를 준비할 생각도 안했다. 부자감세와 건설업체 지원, 4대강에는 돈을 펑펑 쓰는 정부가 국민들의 생명과 안전에는 나 몰라라한 것이 이명박 정부다.

그러나 나는 이 추석에 정부만 도마에 올려놓을 것이 아니라 더 눈을 돌려 21세기의 인류가 왜 과학과 현대 의학의 성과에도 불구하고 여전히 전염병에 고통 받아야 하는지를 생각해보자고 제안한다. 왜 이 세계는 생명보다 이윤을 중요시여기고 있는지 또 과연 이러한 ‘세상의 비참’을 낳고 있는 이 자본주의가 과연 정의와 양립할 수 있는 체제인지를.

그리고 한 가지 더. 전 세계를 떠나 당장 세계보건기구가 신종플루에 가장 취약한 나라의 하나로 뽑은 북한은 지금 어떨까도 생각해보자고 제안한다. 왜 한국 정부는 가장 가까운 이웃과도 의약품과 백신을 나누지 못하는가.

우석균 (보건의료단체연합 정책실장, 건강과대안 부대표)

서강대대학원신문/프레시안 10월 1일자

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

Greed Is Good? He Begs to Differ

By MANOHLA DARGIS

출처 : 뉴욕타임즈(New York Times) Published: September 23, 2009
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/movies/23capitalism.html?scp=5&sq=michael%20moore&st=cse?em

Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is anything but — something you, I and everyone who has ever watched him shamble into action, megaphone to mouth, know from the start. He might have had a crush on capitalism early on, yet anyone who thinks that the two have been on friendly terms for a while hasn’t been paying attention. After years of needling big business in movies like “Roger & Me” (about the auto industry) and “Sicko” (health insurance), and giving voice to the disempowered, he has finally decided to go after the system that, in his words, is dedicated to “taking and giving, mostly taking.”

His timing couldn’t be better, as the headlines and innumerable journalists, politicians, bloggers, tea partiers, talk-show bloviators and millions of unemployed, underemployed, fed-up and freaked-out citizens are making clear. It’s the morning after in America (where one of the big movie hits of the year is titled “The Hangover”), and Captain Mike is here to explain it all or at least crack jokes, milk tears, recycle the news and fan the flames of liberal indignation. Along the way, because his heart is in the right place even if his images aren’t always, he also makes room for other voices, including those of striking workers and members of one family in foreclosure who videotaped the police breaking down the door to evict them.

Nothing if not direct, Mr. Moore cuts right to the point or rather the queasy joke, opening the movie with surveillance shots of citizens partaking of a favorite pastime: robbing banks. He then introduces some wittily culled clips from a movie titled “Life in Ancient Rome,” which looks and sounds like one of those educational flicks you tried to sleep through in school and which he juxtaposes with more recent totems of American power, including the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center draped in the Stars and Stripes. (The New York premiere of the movie on Monday was at Alice Tully Hall, the main site for the New York Film Festival. Mr. Moore isn’t in this year’s lineup, but still grabbed some of its spotlight.)

America, in other words, is headed straight down the historical toilet, along with Nero and his fiddle (or rather Dick Cheney, who’s anointed with a throwaway reference to the “emperor”), a thesis that Mr. Moore continues to advance if not refine with another hour and a half or so of alternatingly entertaining and distracting found footage; some stirring archival images of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; snippets from charming home movies; and assorted weeping, gloating, pontificating and sensible talking heads. Some of those heads are baffling (the actor and author Wallace Shawn, enlisted to explain free enterprise); some of them are sharp, welcome, bracing, provoking, mostly when they’re able to talk without too much interference from the comically mugging, slack-jawed Mr. Moore.

Despite the waggish invocation of ancient Rome, the story in “Capitalism” more truly begins where and when its director did, in Flint, Mich., after the end of World War II. In broad strokes Mr. Moore, who was born in 1954, positions himself as an Everyman whose family reaped all the usual rewards of postwar middle-class prosperity. This collective dream begins to disintegrate rather fuzzily (cue the Vietnam War), coming to a bummer climax in the 1970s (cue an unsmiling Jimmy Carter in a cardigan) and culminating in the ascension of the Smiler in Chief, Ronald Reagan, whom Mr. Moore introduces as a “spokesmodel for president.” Tax cuts, union busting and household debt ensue, as does some protest, notably in the form of “Roger & Me,” Mr. Moore’s first movie.

Mr. Moore doesn’t just refer to “Roger & Me,” which involved his attempts to speak with Roger Smith, the chief executive of the floundering General Motors; he also includes some nominal highlights from that 1989 movie. A lot of performers like to replay their early hits, so it isn’t surprising that Mr. Moore, a practiced showman, recycles images of his younger, slimmer self engaging in one of his trademark moves: trying to enter a building to speak truth to power, only to be turned away by security guards. It was faintly amusing theater then, especially if you didn’t think too hard about the fact that he was hassling working people just trying to do their jobs. It’s less amusing when he repeats the same routine in “Capitalism.”

He’s on far firmer ethical ground when he doesn’t use other human beings as props. Some of the more effective scenes in “Capitalism” involve his straightforward, journalistic interviews with people who have been abused by the greed of their employers. In one segment he visits with a widower whose wife was unknowingly insured by her company — a sleazy practice colloquially known as dead peasant insurance — which earned it a chunk of change when the woman died. (Even after death, your boss can exploit you.) Like many of the stories Mr. Moore pulls together in this movie, dead peasant insurance might not be a revelation to those who follow the news, but it makes for infuriating viewing.

In the end, what is to be done? After watching “Capitalism,” it beats me. Mr. Moore doesn’t have any real answers, either, which tends to be true of most socially minded directors in the commercial mainstream and speaks more to the limits of such filmmaking than to anything else. Like most of his movies, “Capitalism” is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it’s also an entertainment. This isn’t the story of capitalism as conceived by Karl Marx or Naomi Klein, and it certainly isn’t the story of contemporary American capitalism, which extends across the globe and far beyond Mr. Moore’s sightlines.

Neither is it an effective call to action: Mr. Moore would like us to vote, which suggests a startling faith in the possibilities of social change in the current political system. That faith appears to be due in some part to the election of President Obama.

As it happens, the most galvanizing words in the movie come not from the current president but from Roosevelt, who in 1944 called for a “second bill of rights,” asserting that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The image of this visibly frail president, who died the next year, appealing to our collective conscience — and mapping out an American future that remains elusive — is moving beyond words. And chilling: “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” It’s a brilliant moment of cinema both for the man delivering the speech and for Mr. Moore, who smartly realized that he’d found one other voice that needed to be as loud as his own.

“Capitalism: A Love Story” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Strong language.

CAPITALISM

A Love Story

Opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Michael Moore; directors of photography, Daniel Marracino and Jayme Roy; edited by John Walter and Conor O’Neill; music by Jeff Gibbs; produced by Mr. Moore and Anne Moore; released by Overture Films. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes.

============

<마이클 무어 신작 개봉에 美 '시끌'>

자본주의, 이미 실패” 정조준
우파 “재능 잘못 활용” 비난

출처 : 연합뉴스  2009/09/25 16:06 송고
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2009/09/25/0200000000AKR20090925137500009.HTML?did=1179m

(서울=연합뉴스) 김중배 기자 = 사회고발성 다큐멘터리로 명성을 얻어온 미국 마이클 무어 감독의 신작 ‘자본주의:러브스토리’가 개봉되면서 미국 사회가 온통 시끄럽다.

   무어 감독이 자본주의의 탐욕을 정면으로 고발하며 그간의 문제의식을 집대성한 것으로 알려진 이 다큐멘터리는 23일 뉴욕과 로스앤젤레스에서 개봉한 이래 내주 미국 전역에서 상영될 예정이다.

   지난 1989년 제너럴 모터스(GM)의 비인간적 경영 행태를 고발한 ‘로저와 나’로 명성을 얻기 시작한 이래 줄곧 사회성 짙은 다큐멘터리를 제작해온 무어 감독은 이번 작품에서는 개인사와 옛날 필름, 광고성 영상에 특유의 유머감각을 버무렸다.

   은행가를 공격하는데 그치지 않고 제대로 보상받지 못하는 노동자들의 생산성 문제, 집을 저당잡아 먹고사는 자본가, 민간 소유 청소년 교화시설의 끔찍한 이야기 등 자본주의를 총체적으로 고발한다.

   또 자본가 시스템이 부자에게 혜택을 주고, 수 백 만명을 가난으로 몰아넣었다고 비난하며 사회주의로의 이행을 공공연히 주장한다.

   무어 감독은 23일 포천지와 인터뷰에서 애초 자본주의가 반미국적이고, 반기독교적이며 반민주적이라는 가정 아래 영화 촬영에 임했으나 금융위기를 겪으면서 자본주의는 이를 넘어 이미 실패한 개념이라는 결론에 도달했다고 주장했다.

   이어 24일 CNN 래리 킹과의 인터뷰에서도 “우리가 자유시장, 자유기업, 경쟁이라고 부르는 자본주의는 이미 지난해 실패했다”며 “월가의 금융인들은 바로 우리의 퇴직연금과 기금을 가지고 투기에 나선 것”이라고 거침 없이 비난했다.

   자본주의 체제를 비난하는데 치중한 무어 감독의 영화에 대해 우파는 불편한 심기를 감추지 않고 있다.

   폭스뉴스의 테드 바어 칼럼니스트는 “그가 사악한 목적 대신에 좋은 목적에 그 같은 재능을 활용했으면 좋았을 것”이라고 비꼬았다.

   월스트리트저널(WSJ)의 조 모겐스턴 칼럼니스트도 “그의 최신작은 다큐멘터리라기보다 자본주의 체제에 대한 제멋대로의 부정이며 경멸적이고 산만하며 반복적인 내용 등을 담고 있다”고 비난했다.

   무어는 이번 신작과 ‘로저와 나’ 이외에도 총기규제(볼링 포 콜럼바인), 부시 행정부의 테러와의 전쟁(화씨 9/11), 의료제도(식코) 등 갖가지 미국의 추문을 들춰내며 사회 이슈화했다.

   무어 감독은 2005년 시사주간지 타임이 선정한 100인의 영향력 있는 세계적 인물에 선정되기도 했다.

   jbkim@yna.co.kr