Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[Ares Land]

There's a bit of a selection bias here; most examples of cooperative socialism are small-scale. Except for Mondragon -- but I have no experience with that.

Though as it happens I'm not fond of agribusiness, and I think the way forward is more small-scale.

[Travis B.]

Though as it happens I'm not fond of agribusiness, and I think the way forward is more small-scale.

Agribusiness has its many faults, but whatever replaces it needs to be equally efficient in feeding the world. Of course, becoming vegetarians (disclaimer: I am not a vegetarian or vegan by any count) would help, as much of the food agribusiness produces today serves to feed animals that become meat rather than humans directly.

[Ares Land]

Current farming practices aren't environmentally sustainable as they stand, in any case. Not to mention the health hazards, both on producers (very high cancer rates among farmers) and consumers.

As I recall, I think studies found that you could feed the entire world population using nothing but organic farms -- at the cost of deforestation, productivity being lower. Not that I'd really insist on organic farming at all costs, either.
Other than that, I really don't know enough about agriculture to tell what the best option would be. One thing that seems certain is that industrial megafarms are really not needed.

[Travis B.]

Current farming practices aren't environmentally sustainable as they stand, in any case. Not to mention the health hazards, both on producers (very high cancer rates among farmers) and consumers.

As I recall, I think studies found that you could feed the entire world population using nothing but organic farms -- at the cost of deforestation, productivity being lower. Not that I'd really insist on organic farming at all costs, either.
Other than that, I really don't know enough about agriculture to tell what the best option would be. One thing that seems certain is that industrial megafarms are really not needed.

Here we essentially have to balance the environmental impact of using more land to feed the same number of people versus the environmental benefit of using lower quantities of pesticides and herbicides. I myself do not have a clear answer here.

[Torco]

There is, of course, a sort of optimization problem between capital-intensity of agriculture and the desire to lower impact and cause less harm in general. I think a lot of the solution, if there is one, is going to do with the third factor in the equation: manpower.

agribusinesss is so capital-intensive because it strives to be as labour-light as possible: with a combine, a pesticide plane and however many millions in pesticides and all the rest of it, three men can farm a fuckton of hectares and get seven fucktons of corn... but if you give each man, say, ten hectares, they can accomplish similar fucktons-per-hectare with much less capital investment (and tools that are a lot lower-impact and in many senses more efficient: if you have a small 30hp cultivator, honestly you're not being that much more harmful than if you were using an ox).

in capitalism this doesn't work so well, but the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot, food is mostly produced for local consumption, and relatively more people are in the business of producing said food. sure, it'll take more manpower, but we have manpower to spare! a lot of the jobs people do aren't really necessary-for-society-to-function, just necessary-for-making-some-or-other-company-marginally-more-profitable. and what if a bigger % of people end up farmers... farming's good honest work.

[malloc]

in capitalism this doesn't work so well, but the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot, food is mostly produced for local consumption, and relatively more people are in the business of producing said food. sure, it'll take more manpower, but we have manpower to spare! a lot of the jobs people do aren't really necessary-for-society-to-function, just necessary-for-making-some-or-other-company-marginally-more-profitable. and what if a bigger % of people end up farmers... farming's good honest work.

Sure but farmers and rural people more generally are also extremely right wing. We don't necessarily want the ruralization of society if we're trying to avoid authoritarianism.

[Ketsuban]

the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot, food is mostly produced for local consumption, and relatively more people are in the business of producing said food.

How do you solve the following problems?

1. One "small-ish plot" is not equal to another. A plot of land in a swamp is going to be less productive than a plot of land not in a swamp, creating inequality.
2. Families are not all the same size. A couple who produce more than two children will split their land in order to give all their children an inheritance; a couple who produce only one child will give both their plots to that one child, creating inequality.
3. Some people are bad at farming. If you task them with growing their own food they may starve, and will almost certainly be unhappy.
4. Some people don't want to be farmers. If you task them with growing their own food they will be unhappy.
5. Some people like to eat a variety of foods, not just things that grow in the soil where you live. If you task them with growing only what they can grow nearby they will be unhappy.

sure, it'll take more manpower, but we have manpower to spare! a lot of the jobs people do aren't really necessary-for-society-to-function, just necessary-for-making-some-or-other-company-marginally-more-profitable. and what if a bigger % of people end up farmers... farming's good honest work.

According to who, you? I know the nobles who leave written records of their opinions and could afford to commission drawings liked bucolic scenes with lots of peasants in various stages and degrees of industry, but to my knowledge we don't have any medieval surveys of how much subsistence farmers enjoyed their lot in life. Nobody taught them to read or write, you see, it wasn't necessary for society to function.

[Nortaneous]

in capitalism this doesn't work so well, but the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot, food is mostly produced for local consumption, and relatively more people are in the business of producing said food. sure, it'll take more manpower, but we have manpower to spare! a lot of the jobs people do aren't really necessary-for-society-to-function, just necessary-for-making-some-or-other-company-marginally-more-profitable. and what if a bigger % of people end up farmers... farming's good honest work.

Maybe honest, but not good. The overwhelming reaction of almost all farmers to the availability of non-farming jobs is to stop farming. It's miserable, backbreaking, physically and financially risky work. You're producing interchangeable commodities, you're at the mercy of the weather, and you have to get out of bed before the crack of dawn to slop the chickens. Most of the "farmers" I hear from do it as a money-losing hobby because they like keeping goats or whatever, and live in a household supported by someone with an email job.

Food produced for local consumption means everyone is at the mercy of the weather. If there's a poor wheat crop in Minnesota, you really want the supply chain to replace it with imported wheat from Ukraine, and you want it to get regular exercise so it's there when you need it. And regardless of the wheat, out-of-season fruits and vegetables are very nice to have - how would you like to live on porridge and lutefisk all winter, and rose hip soup so you don't get scurvy?

What does it take to have supply chains that can move wheat halfway around the world? It takes transportation, and people to build it and maintain it, and to research making it more efficient; it takes people to manage all of those projects, to oversee the building and the maintenance, to direct the research; it takes people to explain the efficiency improvements and to drive the change management processes surrounding their adoption. It takes regulation and compliance - regulatory compliance is often used as a government job creation machine, but it has to exist in some form. It takes the ability for these organizations to hire and pay workers, which means it takes payroll companies (don't do your own payroll in-house – this is an exceptionally stupid way for startups to fail, and one that I've seen happen, though thankfully not from within), and the payroll companies could hire legions of human computers, but isn't that a horrible waste of human energy? And anyway, it's more expensive, and the cost of hiring the human computers would be passed on to the organizations that have to maintain payroll, and then to the cost of transportation, and then to the consumer. At scale, maybe it's low - maybe it's only a tenth of a cent per bushel - but we've focused on one of the ten thousand things. The wholesale price of a bushel of wheat at the time of writing is $5.27. If we stop optimizing the ten thousand things to eliminate the ten thousand tenths of a cent per bushel of wheat, but we hold the supply chains constant, the price of wheat almost triples, and so does the price of everything else.

To handle the computations with a computer, though, you need software, and databases which deal with money and therefore don't get to have bugs. In order to ensure that the databases don't eat anyone's money, there are people who get paid to sit in air-conditioned offices and think about formal verification of software all day, and those people also need project managers and salesmen and so on, in order to explain to the payroll company what it means to formally verify software, so that the payroll companies can all cut their costs, and then (over a long enough timespan that vendor lock-in washes out, which doesn't need to be that long - tech startups don't use Oracle!) lower their prices to stay competitive, which lowers the cost of shipping, and so on.

Maybe it's not necessary for people to have resources at their disposal, to be able to go to the club or buy a guitar or whatever. But a global shire of hobbits waking up before dawn to slop the chickens until they gracelessly expire in a crop failure sounds dismal, especially compared to a mechanized future where everyone's a plantation aristocrat who can spend all day writing monographs on the finer points of Avestan grammar or inventing new microgenres of club music or sleeping in til noon because they own [suitably abstracted financial shares in an enterprise that owns] machines that slop the chickens for them.

[Raphael]

I mostly agree with a lengthy Nort post. What is the world coming to?

[Travis B.]

I have to agree with Nort -- does anyone really want a world in which everyone is a subsistence farmer, as nice as it may sound to some (non-farmers)?

[zompist]

it takes payroll companies (don't do your own payroll in-house – this is an exceptionally stupid way for startups to fail, and one that I've seen happen, though thankfully not from within)

I'm curious about this bit, because in fact I did the payroll for my parents' business. It wasn't that hard, though that was no more than half a dozen employees at a time. That was a long time ago, so it may well have gotten much more complicated since. But how does it actually make a business fail?

On the rest, good points— I don't think more than a tiny fraction of people want to be farm workers if anything else is available.

[Nortaneous]

it takes payroll companies (don't do your own payroll in-house – this is an exceptionally stupid way for startups to fail, and one that I've seen happen, though thankfully not from within)

I'm curious about this bit, because in fact I did the payroll for my parents' business. It wasn't that hard, though that was no more than half a dozen employees at a time. That was a long time ago, so it may well have gotten much more complicated since. But how does it actually make a business fail?

In the case I've read postmortems about, they tried to write their own payroll software, "they" here being a medical consulting company.

[Raphael]

it takes payroll companies (don't do your own payroll in-house – this is an exceptionally stupid way for startups to fail, and one that I've seen happen, though thankfully not from within)

I'm curious about this bit, because in fact I did the payroll for my parents' business. It wasn't that hard, though that was no more than half a dozen employees at a time. That was a long time ago, so it may well have gotten much more complicated since. But how does it actually make a business fail?

In the case I've read postmortems about, they tried to write their own payroll software, "they" here being a medical consulting company.

OK, I can see how that might lead to problems.

[Ares Land]

I entirely agree with Torco here.

As you'll see, I disagree with the rest of you, vehemently

At the heart of the problem is, I think, a false dichotomy. This isn't a binary choice, with one hand globalized, mechanized agriculture, and on the other hand Dung Ages subsistence farming!
There are in fact a range of possibilities besides these two.

My point is that globalized industrial agriculture may be feeding the world but at the cost of accelerating everyone's death, through various forms of environmental destruction (global warming is one of the big ones; there are others). Feeding the world at the risk of turning into sterile overheated wasteland kind of defeats the whole purpose.

There are better ways, which probably involve less industrialization, less fertilizers and so on. It doesn't mean turning the clock back to the Middle Ages, or renouncing technology and modernity entirely.

Torco is quite right to point out that it may well be more labor intensive, and that it's not necessarily a bad thing.
In France, right now, about 1.5% of the workforce are farmers. Suppose farms should be five times more labor intensive -- that'd be bring the proportion to 7.5%. That's really not the Middle Ages; it's, in fact, the figure for 1981.
Farming isn't for everyone -- but you'll find plenty who'd enjoy it more than the alternatives. There are people going back to farming right now, when it's (as pointed out in this thread) kind of a very expensive hobby.
There are other advantages to investing more labor into farming -- one of them is having more people on the farm than strictly needed on a farm so people can catch a break and go on vacation from time to time.
7.5% or even 10%, or even 15% still leaves plenty of non-farming jobs around. It's a very different picture than people being forced to be subsistence farmers.

Sure but farmers and rural people more generally are also extremely right wing. We don't necessarily want the ruralization of society if we're trying to avoid authoritarianism.

It's the exact opposite with small-scale organic farmers; they're actually pretty far to the left.
More generally, there are no absolute truth about how people vote according to occupation; factory workers used to be very left-wing, now they tend towards the far-right.

Maybe honest, but not good. The overwhelming reaction of almost all farmers to the availability of non-farming jobs is to stop farming. It's miserable, backbreaking, physically and financially risky work. You're producing interchangeable commodities, you're at the mercy of the weather, and you have to get out of bed before the crack of dawn to slop the chickens. Most of the "farmers" I hear from do it as a money-losing hobby because they like keeping goats or whatever, and live in a household supported by someone with an email job.

That's a very correct picture. But farming being kind of miserable job is not an absolute law of nature. There are very concrete reasons why this is so.
The key thing here is that farmers have to sell at extremely low prices, often at a loss. There are several reasons for this:

• Retail and supermarket chains are extremely greedy.
• The global supply chain means farmers have to compete at a global level. That means competition with countries with very different cost of living and labor standards (very close to slavery at times), and sometimes very low standards when it comes to food production.

This is a problem that will have to be solved one way or another, because again, none of this is environmentally sustainable.

Oh, one objection though; food is anything but an 'interchangeable commodity'; there's a huge variation in variety and flavor that's being completely erased.

There's also the small matter of quality, very much relevant here.

Food produced for local consumption means everyone is at the mercy of the weather. If there's a poor wheat crop in Minnesota, you really want the supply chain to replace it with imported wheat from Ukraine, and you want it to get regular exercise so it's there when you need it.

Several points here. One is that of course, the question is not to get rid of trade entirely. There's not much of getting rid of a global supply chain entirely but it can't be so integral to the agricultural market or handle the same kind of volume.
Another point: the global supply chain is definitely not environmentally sound. It's one of the major contributors to global warming, from production to actual transport.
Yet another point: it's not nearly as resilient as we think. I remember mustard shortages -- most mustard is grown either in Canada or Ukraine; turns out that in 2021 one of these was on fire and the other at war. It doesn't seem quite so smart, especially since mustard is basically a weed here.
Food prices definitely took a hit following war in Ukraine.
The global supply chain benefits whoever owns the container ships; whether it really benefits us remains to be determined. In any case, it definitely won't ensure food safety once global warming really hits.

And regardless of the wheat, out-of-season fruits and vegetables are very nice to have - how would you like to live on porridge and lutefisk all winter, and rose hip soup so you don't get scurvy?

I don't think there's any objection to importing bananas, or oranges in the winter!
Other than that, your point seems a bit weird. I've been sticking to in-season produce; lutefisk hasn't entered the picture yet.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on much. It's no great sacrifice to give up on tasteless tomatoes in February; I prefer getting real ones in summer.

What does it take to have supply chains that can move wheat halfway around the world? (...)

It seems to be that the ruthlessly optimized supply chain is in fact creating a whole lot of misery. Other than that, no, there's no reason to get rid of computers or payroll software. Again, the goal is not to get back to the Dark Ages.

But a global shire of hobbits waking up before dawn to slop the chickens until they gracelessly expire in a crop failure sounds dismal,

The situation right now is that of a global Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Inc, spending their days in Zoom waiting for ecosystem collapse. Pretty dismal too!

especially compared to a mechanized future where everyone's a plantation aristocrat who can spend all day writing monographs on the finer points of Avestan grammar or inventing new microgenres of club music or sleeping in til noon because they own [suitably abstracted financial shares in an enterprise that owns] machines that slop the chickens for them.

Technologically, we are already there. We have machines that slop the chickens and slaughter them for us; that's precisely how they raise chicken nowadays.
A modern industrial poultry farms can turn out more than a million chicken a year, with only a couple of employees (who are basically night watchmen). It turns out to be a little anticlimatic, because despite the existence of these, we're definely not aristocrats (though a couple of people probably are).

You probably wouldn't care to have a look inside of the mechanized future. We're talking about 21 animals per square meter. None of these ever see the light of day. If that doesn't trouble you, have you heard of what happens when there's an heatwave, or when animals catch avian flu (which means all of them)? I have. The words 'heaps of rotting dead chicken' were used.

I haven't mentioned the health hazards of all this either. I think I should talk about it a little. Can you keep up with the current scandals? I can't. The latest is cadmium, I believe.
There's also the matter of what industrialized farming does to the water supply. (1 million chicken means a lot of chickenshit, and it has to go somewhere, I suppose.)
And then there are the health hazards of pesticides and the like; farming is the profession most exposed to cancer.

This is probably way too long; I think the subject makes me a little angry . Anyway to put it shortly, globalized mechanized farming isn't feeding the world; it's killing it.
The alternative to it doesn't mean living in a global Shire; keeping up with it certainly means dying in a global Mordor.

[Ketsuban]

I entirely agree with Torco here.

I'm not sure you do, given what you seem to be saying is "what if the agricultural industry employed several times more people" whereas what they said was "the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot", i.e. everyone doing subsistence agriculture. I'm unclear what people will actually be doing when 7.5% of the workforce is engaged in agriculture rather than 1.5%, but I'm not sure I like the idea of going from "almost nobody does agricultural labour but we still have abundance" to "a tenth of the population works in agriculture but oops we still have to import food". Nortaneous is correct: agricultural labour sucks, even when it's cyberpunk agriculture.

[Travis B.]

The key thing is that where are you going to recruit the people to become all the new farmers needed for your local organic slow food, and about destroying the environment, what about all the extra land that will be needed to feed the same number of people (cultivating more land to grow food is still destroying the environment even if that food is local organic slow food)? I presume you'll expect us all to become vegans to compensate by eliminating growing food for feeding livestock.

[rotting bones]

In the context of actual land redistribution, I fully agree with Nort. The obligatory economics of scale video against localism: https://youtu.be/_rk2hPrEnk8

That said, I think we can invest more in farming even if most people don't actually work there. It can go into building and automating infrastructure. Especially since giving everyone shares is not the direction we're currently headed: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2 ... al-poverty

Arguments for the other side:

• If people had the option to work in farming rather than being unable to afford groceries (a common situation even in today's wealthy liberal world), they would take it.
• This video says people are willing to work on farms if there are chances for advancement: https://youtu.be/zdWrHb8b-c0
• Eddy: A lot of farmers are Communists. Especially in India, but even in America. This is suppressed in the media. I have an uncle who is a full time professional farmer. He voted CPI (M).

[malloc]

Eddy: A lot of farmers are Communists. Especially in India, but even in America. This is suppressed in the media. I have an uncle who is a full time professional farmer. He voted CPI (M).

I recall that you once stated that peasants are radically intolerant by nature. In the US at least, rural areas overwhelmingly vote right wing. Any map of election results by county exemplifies this.

[rotting bones]

I recall that you once stated that peasants are radically intolerant by nature. In the US at least, rural areas overwhelmingly vote right wing. Any map of election results by county exemplifies this.

Small proprietors in general lean towards fascism. I'm mainly talking about the peasants, farm laborers and destitute workers, not the land owners.

There are exceptions even among small proprietors. My uncle owns his land. There are also a lot of people who don't support the center-left against the right, but will support the far left. Since the mainstream left gave up trying to restructure society in favor of managerialism, their populist rhetoric was adopted by the right.

Also, note that the CPI (M) redistributed land in Bengal. Then they didn't centralize it.

PS. Am I misremembering this, or does the first episode of the West Wing reference Communist farmers?

[Ares Land]

I entirely agree with Torco here.

I'm not sure you do, given what you seem to be saying is "what if the agricultural industry employed several times more people" whereas what they said was "the planet could eat on a system where each farmer has a small-ish plot", i.e. everyone doing subsistence agriculture.

I don't think that's what Torco was saying:

relatively more people are in the business of producing said food

(emphasis mine). Maybe I misunderstood something but I really don't think what he meant was everyone doing subsistence agriculture.

I'm unclear what people will actually be doing when 7.5% of the workforce is engaged in agriculture rather than 1.5%, but I'm not sure I like the idea of going from "almost nobody does agricultural labour but we still have abundance" to "a tenth of the population works in agriculture but oops we still have to import food". Nortaneous is correct: agricultural labour sucks, even when it's cyberpunk agriculture.

The current abundance is to a large extent illusory; it relies on environmental damage which is completely neglected; also on poor food quality, which is largely ignored.
The idea is to have abundance, but that requires serious change.

The key thing is that where are you going to recruit the people to become all the new farmers needed for your local organic slow food,

There are two questions here really; one is to make the profession attractive enough. (This is something we want to do anyway; what's the point of socialism if not to make sure peoples' lives don't suck?)
The other is that farming is a skilled profession that requires training and experience. This isn't something that should be neglected; I don't think it's an insurmountable barrier.

and about destroying the environment, what about all the extra land that will be needed to feed the same number of people (cultivating more land to grow food is still destroying the environment even if that food is local organic slow food)? I presume you'll expect us all to become vegans to compensate by eliminating growing food for feeding livestock.

I don't think there's a general answer to that question. Is extra land needed? What's the proper balance to be found between intensive agriculture and expanding agricultural land? That's best decided locally, as the answer will vary according to area.
I'm sympathetic to organic farming, but I'm not sure I'd insist on it as a matter of dogma. The current levels of pesticide or fertilizer use are unsustainable and dangerous; if there are ways to use, say, pesticides effectively without environment or health damage, fine.

One important point, though, is that it's not a matter of choice or personal taste. If pesticides kill pollinating insects, then you have to stop using pesticides because you can't live without pollinating insects.

To answer the other question: I really don't believe in universal veganism. I don't think it's either feasible or desirable. Though, I mean, if people want to be vegan, great!
What is certainly necessary is cutting down on meat consumption.