The farming is okay. Just make sure to discourage anyone from feeling they have some sort of divine ownership over the land. Examples:
Little Johnny says "This is my land!" Knock that little bugger over and say "it's mine now."
If John says "God has given me this land to carry out his will!" turn that fucker into fertilizer so that he may be of use to society.
So if you spend months preparing a harvest, you'd be cool with someone turning up in the night and taking the crops after you've done all the hard work? After all the land wouldn't being to you.
They took more than was fair, so it wouldn't be fair.
Group ownership of a resource isn't in conflict with controlling the resource, or having laws and practices to determine how it's used.
Kinda like how we all own Yellowstone park, but no one is free to bottle and carry off all the water from old faithful.
So do you think it's fair for a group of people to raid a farm and pick what they haven't contributed to growing as long as they take just enough to feed themselves, piggybacking off the work of the farmer? Why should the farmer agree to this?
Edit: rewrote the question to satisfy people who think asking questions about is somehow combative.
Do you have anything to contribute? I'm trying to have an actual discussion about policy.
I think the profit incentive is important in maximising yield, do you have anything to add to this as to why I may be wrong? Or are you just going to signal me as an other so that others just switch off and get defensive.
I think it's kind of ironic that some claim to want the world to see things from their point of view but then immediately attack those who question their views or try to understand. This just suggests to me you're more about signalling to your in group than growth in ideas and discussion.
There is a lot to discuss. I'm discussing about why I think communal style living/economics don't scale well. You think it does, there are reasons we both have our opinions and maybe we could actually learn from each other rather than you viewing me as someone to be defeated.
Sounds like you're purposely twisting the person you're responding to's words to make them sound bad. It just ends up making you sound combative and doesnt further your arguement
Not really, I'm just trying to understand their position. It's not combative to ask pertinent questions.
Its not pertinent questions if you invent a scenario that the person you have questioned have not said they support. Do you think its fair to blame someone for something they did if a person put a loaded gun to their head and told them to do it? (See? My question has NOTHING to do with anything you've stated previously)
I invented a hypothetical scenario for a thought experiment yes. I don't think it's implausible as a scenario in a communal situation. If there is no private farmland property there is nothing to stop people just straight up taking things and abusing the goodwill of the farmer.
"raid" implies non-consent, so no, that's not fair.
It's also not fair for a farmer to find some prime farmland, build a fence around it and say no one else can touch it, and then keep everything it produces to himself, and then call everyone who wasn't able to claim good land but still wants to eat a thief.
Why does he get rights to the land just because he said it's his? That leads to feudalism.
"Civilization" is about finding balance to what's fair.
It's unfair for people to want something for nothing.
That extends to people wanting food, and also to the farmer claiming land.
Some arrangement where the farmer gets to keep his crops, but can't exclude people from also working the land, with some sort of communal oversight to make sure the land is being worked well seems fair.
They don't just find land and build a fence around it though in the modern era, that's extremely reductionist. They pay for the privilege to work the land. Society as a whole agree the land is his because of this.
You have an ideological disagreement with private ownership is how im interpretting your stance unless im misunderstanding. However. The idea of these communal structures society wide has died long ago because it simply can't work inside the framework of how human beings are biologically wired. We are tribal primates, feudal hierarchical structures continue to be proven as inevitable despite all of our best efforts. Even with communism some of the earliest writings out of Russia one of the immediate concerns brought about by Russian revolutionaries was the concern that the class hierarchy in communism begins with the inception of the revolutionary class (those who are organizing and leading the revolution) and without fail thats what happened in every communist state. The revolutionaries took over and the first thing to happen is establishment of class hierarchy just like what happens in capitalist society. Collective agriculture in Russia and in China and in central america and in north korea lead to millions starved to death.
capitalism is a fucked up system. Rife with exploitation and amorality. But its also the system that has lifted the most people globally out of abject poverty than anything else in human history. It has raised life expectancies higher than ever before seen. It has lowered infant mortality by ridiculous levels. The number of people dying in war is lower than ever.
You have a government that in its constitution says right in the headline is "to provide for the general welfare" of its citizens. If you want to talk about more fair levels of distribution of essential resources then you utilize your government to negotiate buying food from the farmer and instituting a distribution mechanism for the people. Same reason why in my opinion I believe medicare needs to beable to negotiate with drug companies over prices. There needs to be a middle ground.
Yes, you have misinterpreted my position. I'm not opposed to private property. I love having stuff. Stuff is some of my favorite things to have, truth be told.
I'm opposed to hoarding, and I'm opposed to exploitation.
If the farmer wants to farm the land and sell the food, I'm all for that. If the land owner wants to have the farmer farm the land, then take all the money from the farmer selling it, keep most of it and pay the farmer just enough to get by, I think that instead the farmer should get that money.
When your contribution to the process is "I have stuff, so you should give me more", then I question why you're needed for the system to function.
I agree the word raid was the wrong word to use there
They don't just find land and build a fence around it though in the modern era, that's extremely reductionist. They pay for the privilege to work the land. Society as a whole agree the land is his because of this.
How do you parse how much belongs to the farmer and how much belongs to the community? I would argue we already have an arrangement like that. Who oversees this and what do they get out of if?
Most importantly where is the incentive to maximise yield if people are just growing personal crops? What if you want to eat but don't want to work the land?
You're moving your goalposts at this point. The original point was literally about people claiming land in a primitive extraction system.
In the modern era people also don't just walk up and demand bushels of barely from farmers, so ignoring the entirety of a comment to reply with how changing the context makes it irrelevant is just a bad faith discussion tactic.
Yes, a modern economic system is hard to develop inside of a single comment. I hope we can at least agree that feudalism is bad, despite it respecting the Lord's property rights, and also that no one is okay with letting the Saxon horde take all our grain.
And, to jump straight to your questions about the modern day: I would propose a system where the vast majority of the engines of production would be worker owned, allowing them to select their own management as primary shareholders.
By merit of existing in society people would be entitled to food, shelter, medicine, a means to better themselves, and the basic dignites of modern life (clothing, the ability to have children, the ability to do more than sit in the floor and stare at the wall).
Beyond what's needed to provide these basics, the excess value produced would be given to those that produced it in the form of "currency", which can be exchanged for "goods" and "services".
I'm aware that's not how the modern world works,but evidently there are many in this thread who thinks that's how it should work. I don't think I'm engaging in bad faith whatsoever, I'm trying to actively address your points.
Why should workers own the means of production? What is incentivising them to even create the means of production without profit motive?
If workers own the means of production, what would stop them from deciding they'd rather sell said means to a capitalist for a profit?
Does every worker have an equal ownership? Does someone who has been working there for 10 years have the same rights as someone who is new? How do you decide this and who is overseeing this? What mechanisms exist to stop the primary shareholders from just assuming control and deciding to pay wages to people instead?
Sounds like you aren't intelligent enough to understand this. This is why fascists attack schools first, they need people like you.
Small-scale, local farming is where it's at. Growing a bucket of potatoes on a balcony or helping out at a community garden are small but achievable steps to bring the food closer to us. In addition to sustainability, it promotes knowledge of how to produce our own food and reduces dependence on large-scale monoculture farming.
It's nice to walk a few paces and pick up an ingredient for dinner with the satisfaction that you nurtured it. But mainly, I just don't feel like going to the grocery store as much lol.
Check out !BalconyGardening@slrpnk.net :)
I do sure wish I had a balcony. I grew peppers and cherry tomatoes on my windowsill a few years in a row but the effort isn't worth it for an apartment...
I feel ya! We work with what we can and if the space you have isn't feasible, then that's okay if it simply doesn't work out.
That being said, here's a few options to consider but do what you want. :)
One option is to grow some herbs since those tend to get pricey and they therefore offer the best bang for your buck. Plus they take up little space. Starting from seeds is the most cost effective (only a couple dollars for 1000s of seeds). Sow them in an empty plastic egg carton, nursery pots, or other upcycled plastic container. Then, you can germinate and grow under grow lights. Don't bother with "grow light" marketed ones. Just the brightest, whitest generic LED bulb will do. If you run it all day, it'll only cost a couple cents per month. Then, you can harvest fresh herbs year-round! Lamps can be found for cheap and sometimes free on Facebook marketplace.
Another option is finding a community garden in your area.
I do already keep herbs going as much as possible! (though I don't do it from seed, lazy bum)
The community garden idea is great, but the ones in the city center here are... expensive and quite "hipsterish".
I think most of the things you say are true, but small local farming isn't going to solve world hunger. The bigger a farm gets the more efficient it can operate. The progress we made as a species boils down to how much more efficient we can do stuff.
For sure! Industrial-scale farming has been integral to the population growth of our modern society. It doesn't hurt to alleviate a small amount of pressure from those systems at a local scale in a sustainable way. I mainly just find it fun to grow a few veggies here and there and thought others may be interested. :)
Absolutely, I planted some tomatoes and very spicy peppers. All of them failed (planted in the wrong month I guess). Definitely a learning experience and definitely something I'll try next summer.
I really hope the plants survive the winter, but I might have to start from seed again
Thank you for referring this community. Its the first time I see it and it was very inspirational. Cheers
•
I grow tomatoes in my balcony. Constructive and fulfilling activity, love it.
But I can't imagine eating like 15 tomatoes per year lol
And that's ok! Nobody expects to live off of a small garden, nor is it feasible for everybody to grow everything they eat.
It provides many benefits already, such as being a fulfilling activity as you said. It also cuts down on food waste since you can harvest when you eat it and leave it on the plant for a bit longer otherwise. It also reduces trips to the grocery store and reduces emissions of importing food over long distances. Finally, it's much cheaper if you grow from seed and upcycle plastic containers for planting. Especially if you grow expensive crops like fresh herbs.
No, but it will help. Do you currently have a plan if you were unable to purchase food at the store?
Yeah more ad hominem attacks. That's a really good way to convince someone you're correct, getting angry and lashing out for the crime of asking questions and trying to foster an open discussion.
For the record, I detest Elon Musk.
Of course I think my current opinions are correct, I wouldn't hold them otherwise. That doesn't mean I'm incapable of changing my mind through persuasive argument. Aren't you also trying to defend your worldview? It's an excellent tactic for trying to refine to yourself what you actually believe putting your views out there for public scrutiny.
•
Industrial production of food is not the problem. Capitalism is.
I mean, good for you if you want to play in a garden with plants, but I don't want to do that. And this kind of production is not enough to feed everyone.
Nobody is claiming an issue with large-scale food production, or that small, local gardens will feed everyone. Also, nobody is telling you what to do.
Rather, that there are benefits to growing even a little bit of your own food should you choose to do so. There's no need to talk down and I hope you're alright, because that's a lotta strawmen.
•
One theory is that hunting and gathering stopped because the human population exceeded what could be supported by mega fauna, and early peoples had no choice but to settle down and defend what resources they could gather.
It likely started with semi permanent settlements, simple fortifications that could be returned to year over year, and when it became too difficult to leave again, or when they found themselves unable to return to a location they were expecting to, they settled down permanently.
But you really can't go out and hunt when you can't leave. So they started to depend on agriculture, and what livestock they'd been able to keep with them.
Right. And then there's the fact that agriculture is a trap in that once you adopt it you can never go back and anyone nearby who doesn't adopt it as well will eventually be outcompeted and disappear as a people, or they will be driven into ever more remote and inhospitable environments. None of this requires anything like foresight or intention either.
No, but you should not be allowed to accumulate more than what you can consume when your community is starving
What should happen is that the people who haven't sowed the crops could do some work in order to earn access to the crops. Then we could create some kind of system whereby people get rewarded for the work they provide with an abstract token. We could call this money and people could exchange it for goods and services.
How do we ensure the correct amount of people are doing the correct amount of work? The good thing about markets is that when demand is high and supply is low it suddenly becomes lucrative to do that thing and it attracts people to doing said thing. It becomes self correcting. If you leave people to just do what they most want to do everybody will choose to do what they consider fun rather than what is needed.
You can still have money and markets. The fundamental problem is the ownership of land and businesses.
Yeah so what? The problem is the disproportionate accumulation of resources, goods or money. Which leads to accumulation of more of them, which lead to accumulation of power. There must be a limit on personal concentration of these. Anything above a level that is considered personal should belong to the community. Then there will be no incentive to make people capable of exploiting other people.
There would also be no incentive for anyone to produce anything beyond what they personally need, which would definitely lead to widespread food shortages. The more food that is produced at once the more efficient the labour is per crop, which is exactly why farms boomed in size after the industrial revolution and advent of farming machinery.
They incentive would be the prosperity of the community as long as people stop seeing each other competitive. Personal gain over dead bodies is only cancer.
But you can throw people out of your community? Then some communities will be a lot better off than others
Yes, but as long as the "better" community doesn't interfere and doesn't try to take advantage of the less good communities I don't see a problem. And of course doesn't steal them their area and resources. Or does't try to expand in ways that they accumulate more goods and resources than they need and can consume
Is this a genuine question wanting to find an answer? Only their consciousness can really prevent them or a "law enforcement" that we should first find a way to be uncorrupted. Is this realistic nowadays? Of course not, but we were talking hypothetically I think
Wealth inequality trends to increase over time. Without some system that actively redistributes wealth, eventually a few people own everything of value, and ordinary people are obligated to do whatever the lords want in order to gain access to the material resources they need to survive. That's feudalism.
Can you name me one single time in human history that this wasn't just the condition of the human race? Every time humans try to institute a wealth redistribution mechanism it becomes corrupted in less than 70 years and it just becomes feudalism again where the people are impoverished and starving and the only people living well are state officials lol
Small scale hunting and gathering societies are universally egalitarian because it's impossible for any one person to accumulate significant wealth or to control resources. The way members of such societies gain influence therefore is through virtue and personal merit. This is the social system that we evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and it's why we still haven't figured out an equally amenable replacement in the mere ten thousand years since we adopted agriculture.
That said, for better or worse, agriculture is a trap, and once we adopted it, there was never any going back, so we have no choice but to keep trying with what we have.
Every pre-agricultural society? I'm not saying they didn't have their own problems, but feudalism wasn't one of them.
•
Were I not lazy, I'd be willing to bet if I sift through their comments that I'd find something about landlords being bad.
•
Well, utilizing a little thing called "context clues" you can see that I'm very clearly not talking about the person I'm responding to. I'm talking about the person claiming private ownership would be better.
My point, is the hypocrisy. But I get it, over half of America reads below a 6th grade level. Ya'll need help getting there.
Well, you called it with me. I was denied an education so I could work and support my family.
Horrah. Good on you. Very observant.
Farming basically invented work and employment. They should have realized something was not right about that back then.
It invented having a relatively reliable food surplus.
I wish I could make all these neoprimitives actually live the life for a week so they shut up forever about it.
Practically every single tribe on the planet decided that the odds for farming was better than rolling the dice every year.
I think it's more likely that it was better odds, and those that continued nomadic life died off at a much higher rate.
I think both of you are not considering two major aspects:
Farming can feed more people on a given fertile area than hunting and gathering can.
Farming is area exclusive, e.g. there is a set amount of people farming in one area and considering this area to be theirs, excluding everyone else from usage.
It is very much possible, that in terms of providing food for the existing population both are equally viable. But with farming you could create larger more densely packed populations, which in turn provided means to exclude others by force. So while hunting and gathering was not necessarily a bad way of life, it did not allow for imperialism and was subsequently diminished by the imperialists.
Man's never heard of the Mongols, Turks, Huns, etc etc etc.
Whose lifestyles only worked because they could trade for food and goods from farming communities btw
And they existed about 2000-1000 years ago. Humans started settling and farming as far back as 10.000-12.000 years ago.
Of course by then populations have increased tremendously. But in the spirit of the meme that probably wasn't the best overall course of action, was it?
•
Hunting and gathering wasn't peace and love. There were wars and resources access problems already. Farming is simply much more efficient. Hunting can only feed people until you reach the natural reproduction of the animals. Same for gathering and plants. Domestication and farming is the process of increasing the volume of food you can have access too. Thus you can feed more people more reliably and with less space.
Human population on earth is directly linked to food access.
I totally agree. Thats why i made the argument "for an existing population". In order to support a growing population changing to farming was the right choice. But not all populations had the ambition or necessity to grow, as we see with many indigenous people that survived quite well until being met with expanding settler societies.
So hunting and gathering wasnt necessarily an inferior lifestyle in terms of running a stable society. Qnd in the long haul it is very much possible that humanities growth leads to its downfall so severely, that a nomadic lifestyle will reemerge as it tends to be more environmentally sustainable.
So while hunting and gathering was not necessarily a bad way of life, it did not allow for imperialism and was subsequently diminished by the imperialists.
Have you seen nowadays how they fish? They destroy whole huge areas leaving no fish behind. This is a type of imperialism. The problem is capitalism in its nature
And for that kind of fishing you need large vessels, built in stationary warfts, using stationary ports. The materials are made in stationary complex apparatusses to extract and shape metals from ore and the ore is mined in stationary mines.
All of this is only possible as a result of settling
Sure. So your idea is that people should be mandated to travel and change places every X years? Or what? I don't get it.
Isn't the problem the disproportionate accumulation of goods, resources and money? AKA capitalism? I mean theoretically, if you restrict these, you can also settle in one place without taking advantage and destroying everything around it.
I wish I could get them to come to an actual farm and realize we aren't trying to kill them or ruin the world.
Right, because hunting and gathering isn't work. People just got food into their mouths doing nothing - like wild animals.
There's a difference between working for your own and your communities good and working for someone else while not being allowed to keep your (fair share of) product/profit.
That’s not how farming started though. They started farming so that they can feed themselves and their community. It eventually devolved into that, but it’s not how it started.
•
I find it so funny that these plastic and credit score are a problem since like 50 years but somehow farming and civilization would be responsible for it. Like capitalism is the only outcome for civilization. It's scary how people are conditioned with this.
Some people believe technological advancement only has one single path. Innovation can only occur as a fixed formula where defined conditions must be met. For example, industrialization can only occur if coal and oil exists.
It's a very arrogant stance which assumes we know everything about the nature of the universe and what is, is all there could ever be.
I would argue the opposite; that semi-agricultural societies --pre-columbian California is a good example-- had no way of knowing where an increasing reliance on predictable harvests would eventually take them.
No! You're looking at this the wrong way. Bisophenol A is the most affordable gender affirmation therapy in existance.
Do you think it is possible for our current level of scientific knowledge to exist in a hunter gather society?
that's stilt houses and rice terracing. those people are gonna invent rectangular sails and fire pistons
Hey everyone, am earning comfortable from home with just a little capital message lizzi Walterfx on Inst-ag-ram
Bruh, there are quite a few things stopping people from doing that, what are you dumb or something?
tbf, there probably actually are people that would try to stop you if you actually did this. Most of the time the land under your feet is owned by someone, and you need their permission.
Especially when there's poachers around and shit.
Flying to Alaska or northern Canada is probably your best bet. Cold though