this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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What if I want to make my own farm?
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.
You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.
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.
Personal property is for personal use. That's it.
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.
what if their father left them the garden and they want to sell it to me? what if they want to move somewhere else and they decide to sell me their property?
Inheritance is antithetical to meritocracy is the basis for generational wealth and capitalist dynasties.
Everything must go, use it lose it.
What even is your motivation to do more than the bare minimum to survive if not to leave it to your children? I would rather take care of my kids future than let some corrupt government do it who will prioritize their children over mine
You can't even imagine helping your neighbors, huh?
You overestimate how much the average person cares for people they don’t know.
Keep telling on yourself.
I wish the truth was different…
It is! Humans are naturally cooperative and empathetic, we aren't selfish assholes that only care about our immediate families.
Empathy is a skill. It atrophies under capitalism, but it could be trained and flourish under different conditions.
From wikipedia:
Ancient views of greed abound in nearly every culture. In Classical Greek thought; pleonexy (an unjust desire for tangible/intangible worth attaining to others) is discussed in the works of Plato and Aristotle.[9] Pan-Hellenic disapprobation of greed is seen by the mythic punishment meted to Tantalus, from whom ever-present food and water is eternally withheld. Late-Republican and Imperial politicians and historical writers fixed blame for the demise of the Roman Republic on greed for wealth and power, from Sallust and Plutarch[10] to the Gracchi and Cicero. The Persian Empires had the three-headed Zoroastrian demon Aži Dahāka (representing unslaked desire) as a fixed part of their folklore. In the Sanskrit Dharmashastras the "root of all immorality is lobha (greed).",[11] as stated in the Laws of Manu (7:49).[12] In early China, both the Shai jan jing and the Zuo zhuan texts count the greedy Taotie among the malevolent Four Perils besetting gods and men. North American Indian tales often cast bears as proponents of greed (considered a major threat in a communal society).[13] Greed is also personified by the fox in early allegoric literature of many lands.[14][15]
Greed (as a cultural quality) was often imputed as a racial pejorative by the ancient Greeks and Romans; as such it was used against Egyptians, Punics, or other Oriental peoples;[16] and generally to any enemies or people whose customs were considered strange. By the late Middle Ages the insult was widely directed towards Jews.[17]
In the Books of Moses, the commandments of the sole deity are written in the book of Exodus (20:2-17), and again in Deuteronomy (5:6-21); two of these particularly deal directly with greed, prohibiting theft and covetousness. These commandments are moral foundations of not only Judaism, but also of Christianity, Islam, Unitarian Universalism, and the Baháʼí Faith among others. The Quran advises do not spend wastefully, indeed, the wasteful are brothers of the devils..., but it also says do not make your hand [as though] chained to your neck..."[18] The Christian Gospels quote Jesus as saying, ""Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions",[19] and "For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.".[20]
That's not "human nature", that's an evolutionary eye blink! Do you think people 50,000 years ago had concepts like that? Absolutely not!
Yes they did. Dogs are greedy. Monkeys are greedy. You dont get far in this world if you dont have some sort of greed baked into your genes.
You aren't a dog and you aren't a monkey.
Human nature is to cooperate and share among the tribe, and the tribe is basically just "anyone who lives in the same place." Yes, maybe expanding the tribe to include "everyone everywhere" is beyond human nature, but we're extremely good at welcoming new people into the tribe. There are countless examples throughout all of human history of new people being welcomed in despite being different, and that's so very different from basically the rest of the animal kingdom. Humans are amazing, stop being a misanthrope.
MFW we’re trying to compare a small tribe to a countries spanning landmasses…
Now you're just highlighting how unnatural human lives are, which makes the entire "human nature" talking point irrelevant anyway!
Every civilization in history has thought of itself and everything it does as natural or ordained by god or somehow fated. It's all bullshit.
In the entirety of human history communism has never worked. Not once has any society been able to work on the ideals of it.
Yeah, because the US bombs them or funds terror cells or blockades their economy.
Cold War. Communism was hunted and destroyed whereever it arose.
If communism was so strong it wouldn't have to worry about capitalist intervention. You just proved my point of communism / socialism being weak if the apparent enemy is easily able to wreck you economy and implode your country it is not a strong system.
Might makes right, then?
In terms of global politics, yes. Every country has fallen back into capitalism in some form, the closest I can think of being truly, actually communist were the Spanish Anarchists based out of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. If you would like to read about them I recommend George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia." Everyone made the same amount, they called each other comrade regardless of rank, etc. They did not last long though, taken out by their own democratic allies during the Civil War.
I disagree. Countries controlled by communist parties today have retreated from socialism by enacting market reforms, but they haven't fallen. A fallen revolution wouldn't bother to call itself communist anymore.
China, in particular, seems to be on a good trajectory and has made a lot of progress towards socialism. There's a reason they tried harder than pretty much every other country on Earth to save their people during the pandemic, despite how much that might have hurt their economy.
China isn't communist, but it's progressive and they're getting there. The revolution just isn't over yet 😘
A person who could actually assemble a farm through small land acquisitions through the power of friendship probably deserves it tbh
I wouldn't really call it friendship. Company is a good word.
You're talking about using your personal connections within the community to slowly assemble a farm from small acquisitions like their deceased father's garden and then leveraging those connections to find people to help you work the land. People that don't need to give you their land and don't need to work your land, they're actually choosing to do it freely. That'd actually be amazing if it ever happened.
That basically has zero relation with how farms work under capitalism.
Freely? No. For money. They can also work for money.
Except they don't need money, so it's still a free choice they're making.
When you don't need money to have a life worth living and all needs are already provided, any choice to work for money is a free one.
Who would provide for their needs? Volunteers?
You actually can't imagine anyone doing any work without wage slavery, huh?
So instead of working for a wage you replace it with... working for no wage?
If there were still wages they would only be something extra as a reward, rather than something workers need to live.
Personal property, remember?
It's not unimaginable for there to be no wages at all, though. No one has to pay me to clean my house, cook my food, or grow my own garden. No one had to pay me to help clean up the trailer park when we were hit by a huge storm that knocked down a bunch of trees. Truly voluntary work for no reward other than good feelings and social esteem shouldn't be underestimated.
That's... probably not something that would be realistic for people like us who grew up under wage slavery, though. We probably do need rewards to do truly difficult work because we've been traumatized by our material conditions to associate working hard with suffering.
The economy is a bit more complicated than fixing up a trailer park buddy... Also, the fact that there are people who only want to do the bare minimum, dont want to help their neighbours and such makes your fairytale utopia collapse. Yes, it sucks that people are greedy and lazy but thats simply what people are. You'll never change that and that's why communism always failed when it was attempted.
Misanthropy. Humans wouldn't have gotten this far if we were all greedy selfish assholes. That's the result of trauma of living under capitalism.
Communism never fails on its own. It is hunted down and destroyed by the US lol
Throughout written human history there are mentions of greedy people.
Yugoslavia wasn't destroyed by the US. Im sure there are more examples. Also, your system is not that great if it can be so easily destroyed by a foreign intervention.
lol you think the Cold War had nothing to do with the collapse of Yugoslavia? Or that the Cold War was easy for the US to win?
okay bud
I am from Croatia. You are from US. Please, educate me about the fall of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was literally and directly backed by the US to oppose the Soviets and when the USSR was defeated Yugoslavia also broke up. It didn't all happen at the same time, of course, but those things are pretty obviously connected. Or do you think that was a coincidence?
Yugoslavia was trying (and failing) to sit in both chairs at the same time, same like Serbia is doing today between Russia and the west. You seem extremely uninformed about the subject. The reason why the breakup began after the fall of Soviet Union is because Soviet Union would provide a big support to JNA in case of any unrest, and any effort at seperation would be ended quickly. HVO and other militaries only had a chance after the Soviets were out of the picture.
Yugoslavia was being propped up as a buffer state by both sides (more the US than the USSR but they both contributed) and once the Cold War became irrelevant there wasn't anyone propping them up. That's it.
You are oversimplifying it severely because you don't know what you are taking about.
You're the one blaming communism for some reason lol
Who decides what constitutes surplus?
The democratically elected central committee, or some other process whereby everyone decides together what our fair share is.