You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you’d have to obtain a lot of land. Then you’d have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you’d have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don’t produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn’t want a garden won’t have one to sell you, because they wouldn’t have one in the first place.
Don’t think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. Think materially.
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
Yes. But don’t worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries “never make the same mistakes as their predecessors,” so if we starve it’ll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
“Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn’t repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely.”
It’s a little different than “nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real.”
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
I don’t think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that’s literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
Its not an as hominem attack kid ^^ Ad hominem would be: you are an idiot and therefore wrong. What he says is “you write wrong stuff and are therfore an idiot”
So, you’re saying that the Global South (either Africa or South America) has made major, concerted attempts at creating effective capitalist states?
There’s a few examples. Australia, of course, though Leftists will obviously discount it.
Chile very deliberately adopted capitalism, though it was under an oppressive dictator. Even so, it’s #3 on the list of South American countries for per-capita GDP these days, and is topping the list for political freedoms.
Uruguay, with it’s famously beige recent politics, is #1.
Of course, you have Indonesia, which has been doing pretty well recently. I wonder why? (/s)
Malaysia and Singapore are technically in the northern hemisphere, so they don’t count I guess…
Most of South America has historically swung radically back and forth between left and right (yes, in part due to US pressure). There’s a leftward swing again. Let’s see how it goes this time! Good news is that if it fails, they can just blame external forces yet again.
and now your making a strawman argument. do you try to play some sort of bogus-argument-bingo?
What is said was: “what a did was not an ad hominem atack”
now your comment starts with: “So, you’re saying that the Global South (either Africa or South America) has made major, concerted attempts at creating effective capitalist states?”
and you even dare to start with: "so what your saying is … "
no thats not at all what i said, i didnt mention the globale south, i didnt metion capitalism, i didnt even agree with OP on his meme.
but thats what you argue against. Do you really not see this or are you a troll?
Well this is a blast from the past. I can’t even load the context anymore.
I was engaged in an argument, and staying focused on the argument instead of getting sidetracked by semantics. But anyway, you claimed “it’s not ad hominem, he said you were wrong therefore you are stupid!” That rests on the assumption that I was wrong, so I was assuming that was your assertion.
I think. This was, after all, months ago, and apparently the account I was arguing with got deleted or something?
It would be an ad hominem Argument if he would take your personality/looks/person as an argument against your talking point/what you say.
This is not the case here. He argues against your talking point/what you say and uses that as an argument against your person.
It doesn’t matter what side of you both is right content wise, its not ad hominem either way, as you botth argue about the information itself. (Plus making [unnessesary] assumptions about each others personality based on the opinion they have in the information)
As homin is ONLY if you use the person saying the opinion against the opinion.
If you use the opinion the person says as an argument against the person, that something totally different and quite logic frankly.
For example: If trump says: poc are violent
Ad hominem would be: this is wrong BECAUSE trump said it.
Normal arguing is: trump is saying this, therefore he is a racist/dumb/wrong.
Two very different things.
And atacking others for caring two much about semantics when you make false (semantic) allegations is another sign of bad discussion style IMHO
I have no hard feelings about this thread, but it bothers me when people are discussing in awaty that is bound to fail, so I wanted to clarify this
I mean acting like Poland was communist or socialist under Stalin and the USSR is like saying north Korea is a democratic people’s republic under the Kims. Regardless of the merits of or against socialism, this argument is pretty silly.
The question was not asked in the Baltic states or Uzbekistan. The question was also not asked in Soviet puppet states like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, etc.
Most of those are also authoritarian. Tossing out one dictator for another is not going to leave people very satisfied.
Communism is a bunch of random people climbing on eachothers back and when one gets to the top he is expected to pull the others up. Which is great if he’s a good person but most people aren’t.
Unlike capitalism, which is a bunch of random people climbing on eachothers back and when one gets to the top he is not expected to pull the others up.
But then he’s valued more and gets tax breaks if he allows others to make him more money by producing value for him. Then he’s a job creator for having ownership of the means of production.
The main issue is that they communism is economic policy, NOT social policy. While they do go hand in hand people often conflate the two. Many dictatorships use communism as a way to control the people but that doesn’t mean that communism leads directly to dictatorships.
Is true Communism even possible if it’s being attempted by flawed humans? Seems like it doesn’t matter the economic system so much as the fact that people will ruin anything given enough time.
It’s about incentives. Worker oppression in Monarchy requires a bad King, in Feudalism bad lords, in Capitalism bad shareholders, and in Socialism self-hating workers. If you shared your workplace, would you push to remove your rights? Or to screw over your customers? And then argue for that against everyone else you share power with? The incentives are plainly better in a worker owned economy.
I guess the main issue is with the government having absolute control over the economy. I would not want the most prominent politicians in my country having control of the economy. No matter how much I dislike capitalism.
Just put the people who work for a company in charge of the company. Have them elect who calls the shots. Also have them directly benefit from the company doing well. I guess that is like end-stage unions or smth. All power to the workers. Should be doable within capitalism, maybe, probably.
A community I created for the discussion of hardcore punk.
r/hardcore is the only subreddit I miss, as it was pretty much the only subreddit with a soul. Working on rebuilding a similar community on lemmy. We’re growing, I think we’re the biggest hardcore community on Lemmy, but these lazy mfs don’t post anything lol.
If you wanna discuss hardcore, post your band’s music, post info about a show, link to resources for finding shows, link to your band’s merch store, feel free to subscribe! I’m a big fan of the DIY mentality in music, so if you’ve got something, share it mother fucker!
I noticed! I appreciate it! I subscribed to [email protected], but the posts aren’t loading for me for some reason :/ I checked infosec.pub/instances and it looks like infosec.pub is linked with waveform.social, so not sure what’s going on there.
I’ll check back in a day or two to see if anything has changed. The sidebar makes me think that it’s a community I would greatly enjoy. I’ve been considering writing some guides on a few things cypherpunk related, and that seems like a good place to post them.
I mean, a lot of these things are good things to consider/know about. For example, you do always have to consider that correlation is not necessarily causation. They’re not really considering the most deep of philosophy, but thinking is generally better than not thinking.
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