Mikhail and Hodj's Political Thread

My problem with the premise is several fold. First, he says you can't employ wage labor to work the farm. Wage labor is a cultural adaptive technique that was utilized in farming, and later in other industries, as the economy moved from a family centric model to a much wider model. To put this in historical context, one of the reasons agricultural societies have many more children fundamentally is so that they can work more farm land and provide more for themselves. In agricultural communities, this is why events like polyamory occurred, having many wives meant you had more children. More wives and more children meant more ability to tend the fields around your yurt, meant more food, more prestige. This is literally how division of classes started on a fundamental level. Those people who were charismatic and popular and could work more land could afford more friends, more wives, more social relations, and grew in status and power until these concepts became formalized as tribal elders and then iterated upon to become priest kings, and emperors and whatnot.

As the population became much more urban over rural during the late 1800s and early 1900s, children were moving from their parents farms to the cities, parents couldn't work all their land by themselves, so they started hiring more and more people to work the farms for them. Farmers became managers and other people became wage laborers under the direction of the farmer. Wage laborers basically just exist as a replacement for children. Why are they wrong to have working for you again? These people want a job, they want to make money. They aren't slaves, and they aren't being exploited in any way. You can't exploit someone by paying them a day's wage for a day's work.

Seems like they're calling for a return to a dead method of production, frankly, one that was not viable or sustainable in modern contexts. Sure it worked great from 15000 BCE to 1850, but since the early 1900s the concept of the family centric farm has fallen on the way side because it cannot produce the amount of food that society needs. That's why India can't meet its food demands. This type of farming is why Africa can't meet its people's demands most of the time, either. This type of farming, the family centered farm, is more vulnerable to weather changes, such as droughts, they tend to produce less overall, and their food goes rotten sooner because they lack the production mechanisms for long term storage and transportation of the goods from their point of production to their point of distribution. The collapse of agriculture in family centered economies as a result of prolonged drought is one of the primary causes attributed to the demise of the Mayan civilization, for instance.

Secondly, if you chop up all the mega farms and start handing them out to individuals, how will they organize the machinery and technology used to produce their products and move them to sale. Look at milk production for an example. Giant cattle farms produce industrial quantities of milk through extraction from cattle on a massive scale. Typically all the machinery for milk extraction is centrally located somewhere on the premises, and then the fields are used for the cattle to feed and roam, what have you. Chop that all up, how do they organize so that everyone gets equal access to the milking machinery so their milk can make it to market? Who is responsible for repairing the equipment if it breaks down? How do you divide that equipment up amongst people, without them owning it? If I am raising cattle and decide I don't want to anymore, how will the next person who comes along know how to operate the equipment, or repair it, or how to properly raise the cattle to keep them healthy enough to produce exportable milk that doesn't make people sick.

Further, with no governmental bodies, with no "state", who will ensure the milk is properly pasteurized and prepared for human consumption? Why would anyone want to get an education in something like pasteurization processing or to work in such an industry if they have no recompense for said work? Why wouldn't everyone just try to be an artist, or a movie maker, something that will have the type of cultural prestige attached to it that it has today, even without monetary and economic status associated with them that are associated with artistic endeavours in our society today.

Its a nice dream, but people don't just pick up skills in an industry overnight like an MMO. "Oh I'll just grind out 200 levels in cattle raising, animal husbandry, milking technology, pasteurization processing, etc. today so tomorrow I can raise cattle!" Doesn't work like that. It takes years and sometimes even decades of work to become competent at a trade like farming. Most farmers throughout history were literally RAISED by their fathers to farm, who were raised by their fathers to farm, so that by the time they reach adulthood, they have the skills necessary to support themselves.

The idea that people can just PICK UP farming, when traditional farming is reliant upon maintaining seed stocks year to year and knowing the right days to plant and the right days to harvest and the right materials to keep insects away and diseases from wiping out your crops, is fantasy of the highest order. Farming took hominins literally 7 million years of intellectual evolution to develop, and people like Dumar and Mikhail want to take Comrade Cletus and Comrade Jamal and put them on the excess land of Khalid's dad's farm that he doesn't use, so they can try to learn to farm.

Who even says Comrade Cletus and Comrade Jamal WANT to learn how to farm in the first place? In fact, most people DON'T want to farm, even before the days of mega agriculture corporations, biotechnology, the green revolution, etc. the family farm was going the way of the dodo for a reason: Kids don't want to learn to farm. They want to learn to be doctors and lawyers and actors and whatever else.

The fact is that this concept would almost certainly lead to mass starvation in this nation. Mass starvation will lead to rioting. Which will threaten the Revolution, and require suppression. And then we're right back where we started with this whole debate.

Honestly, we may have just hit on the fundamental mechanism of Communism that leads to the violence, honestly. The attempt to return to a way of living that has been lost on mass scale leads to societal collapse.

Burnesto_sl said:

Maybe for using the picture of hodj's kids to make fun of him. Although it shouldn't be infraction worthy here in the land of freedom.

It's pretty dumb to post a picture of your kids in the rickshaw.

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Just to make clear, I didn't ask for Tanoomba to be rickshawed, only the picture to be deleted. I don't believe anyone should be rickshawed for posts in the rickshaw ever, I had no control over that aspect. If that makes a difference to Soygen, then I request Tanoomba be unrickshawed for his actions, because my primary concern was him trying to use my children for his antics.

I was going to pop off an email to Tuco or Soygen to have the picture deleted once I woke up this morning, I just hadn't gotten to it yet, because when Tanoomba posted his photoshop I had literally just woken up. It wasn't meant to be a permanent display, so I don't feel it was dumb. My kids are cute and I'm proud of them. I don't mind showing people I consider internet buddies their picture once.

I posted a picture of myself and my wife in the politics thread in General that's still there, and if Tanoomba wasn't such a dipshit he would have just attacked me directly over some aspect of it and nothing would have happened.

I'm pretty sure Tanoomba was just using whatever tools he could at hand to lash out, and wherever the picture got posted, he would have used it, but whatever.

We do need a Dumbgeon though.

Meh it was one picture that was only intended to be up there for a bit, and plus, I like to brag about my kids.

You gotta admit, they're cute little buggers.

Draegan's moderation style is like an abusive husband who comes home drunk from the bar and beats his wife for daring to have dinner ready when he got off work, 5 hours ago.

So now his food's cold, and that bitch is gonna pay.