Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[Torco]

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.

chill, no one's putting on caps with red stars and forcing people to be subsistence farmers at gunpoint, comrade, or subsistence farmers at all. plus, with modern technology you can grow tropical plants anywhere you want: greenhouses and GMOs and all the rest of it do exist.

the way those things are dealt with is going to depend on the various details of the economic system in which the scaling-down of agriculture i'm saying might be a good idea would happen. the point is, there are more options than one guy farms thirty thousand hectares with exactly one crop [or two, as with american farmers, soy and corn] taking out a couple million dollars in loans for every crop.

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.

sure, but what you describe isn't the alternative to the shire: what you get when all the food is run by seventy guys with ultracombines and whatnot is, well, this world, not that one. and this world is not sustainable. i know sustainable sounds like cumbaya my love cumbaya, but what it really means is that it won't work for long even if it does today.

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)?

no, and neither do i tbh, my post really seems to have been misunderstood.

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.

i did like 10 years working in that area, i think i can offer some perspective: sure, for some people running their own HR/payroll is viable at first (though for most, it is not). but HR is a very delicate thing, and mistakes are really costly, but as businesses grow and they start getting more complicated, it becomes less and less viable. plus, it's rather labour-intensive, and it accumulates a lot of complexity if you're not careful: weird bonuses and so on, and every hour you spend doing payroll is an hour you're not doing what you, as the business owner, should be doing: planning the business, improving the product or whatever else. running payroll for 10 guys is not too difficult, running it for 350 people is very hard, and anywhere in the thousands its just veeeeery complicated: eventually as a startup grows it needs to start specializing roles and having either an hr department or outsourcing it, and the bigger the business gets, the more necessary that change is, and the more costly implementing that change becomes, so it's generally better to start with a professional doing it and leaving it mostly alone.

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.

quite so! in fact, modern small-scale agriculture can have much higher yields per hectare vis a vis industrial farms.
slightly more manpower in agriculture (say, 5% of people instead of 1%) has a lot of advantages: for example, you can grow corn with one liter of pesticide per hectare, you don't need to use seven: the reason people use seven is because, well, there's one guy cultivating twenty thousand hectares, so you need to make the odds of any one plant developing an infestation vanishingly thin. if a guy cultuvates, say, 100 hectares, he can know those hectares, and this leads to much better stewardship. he can find and cull infested trees, he doesn't need to shower them all in insecticide. and he can keep better track of the different needs of the different zones of the plot.

and that's not the only place modern agriculture can be improved, either. as it is not, farmland is run on a planned economy system: everyone grows corn cause that's what the exporter/coop/distribution center takes. we have better technology these days, we can implement systems that are more sophisticated than "everyone grows corn here cause the exporter only takes corn", and we can run those systems the computing power of seven sora videos.

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.

hear hear, i'll never forget the time i bought a can of peaches and it said "grown in chile, labeled in the philipines". like, really? they moved however many megatons of peaces to the philipines to be not even canned, but *labeled*, and then brought them back here? is that rational of efficient?

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.

he does, or well, I do. a small-ish plot doesn't have to mean 700 square meters per person allocated by gosplan. middle-scale farmers can get better yields than agribusinesses, and the resulting food is almost always of better quality and diversity. my supermarket sells inedible garbage under the rubric of tomato, midsize farmers grow delicious, tasty, nutritious tomatoes, and in dozens, perhaps hundreds of varieties.

as to farming being horrible work, this is not so clear to me. some googling suggests farmers and nonfarmer rural people have a longer life expectancy than urban people: they lead physically active lives, eat a whole lot better, and don't spend their entire lives inside little cement boxes (or cardboard boxes in america haha american construction) breathing in car exhaust. fresh air and open spaces are good for humans in a way sitting down in front of microsoft excel and gmail browser tabsjust isn't. I have farmed (potatoes, when i was young) and one of my friends runs a for-rent estate. I've hung out with farmers plenty, and it seems to me neither hell nor heaven, but a job with ups and down, nice things and shitty things. farmers don't have to get three roommates to afford a small apartment, i'll tell you that much.

and not to defend meat, though i do admit i like to eat it: generally, cows, goats and chickens don't compete with corn for land: good land goes to corn, medium quality land goes to cows, goats and chickens will happily live and put on weight wherever you put 'em, given water and feed. what animals compete with is with people, over grains and so on.

[WeepingElf]

as to farming being horrible work, this is not so clear to me. some googling suggests farmers and nonfarmer rural people have a longer life expectancy than urban people: they lead physically active lives, eat a whole lot better, and don't spend their entire lives inside little cement boxes (or cardboard boxes in america haha american construction) breathing in car exhaust.

Fair. I have done both farm work and factory work in my life, and I liked farm work better. Not that I really liked farm work, but factory work was worse. (However, I did the farm work I did on a modern farm where much of it involved driving tractors, but I don't think farm work is as horrific as many people who have never done it claim.)

[Raphael]

but I don't think farm work is as horrific as many people who have never done it claim.)

I think the point people have been making was more that it's not as great as many people who have never done it claim.

[WeepingElf]

but I don't think farm work is as horrific as many people who have never done it claim.)

I think the point people have been making was more that it's not as great as many people who have never done it claim.

Well, "The grass is always greener on the other side", the saying goes. Such claims are often made by office workers who have no work experience either on a farm or in a factory

[Torco]

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/Sma ... %20makers.

interesting and relevant, we already live in the world me and Ares are talking about, to some degree. small farmers make one third of the food with three twenti-fifth parts of the land. apparently this third goes up to four fifths of all food in china, where groceries are famously cheap, and is lower in the states, where groceries are quite expensive. who'd have thunk putting a few billionaires in control of production would lead to anything but abundance for the many.

[Travis B.]

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/Sma ... %20makers.

interesting and relevant, we already live in the world me and Ares are talking about, to some degree. small farmers make one third of the food with three twenti-fifth parts of the land. apparently this third goes up to four fifths of all food in china, where groceries are famously cheap, and is lower in the states, where groceries are quite expensive. who'd have thunk putting a few billionaires in control of production would lead to anything but abundance for the many.

That still does not address the problem Nort brought up, is that relatively few people choose to be farmers if given a choice, for good reason.

[Ares Land]

That still does not address the problem Nort brought up, is that relatively few people choose to be farmers if given a choice, for good reason.

One huge problem: it's a lot of work and it doesn't pay nearly enough.
And I'd say, regardless of how many farmers there should be and all that, isn't that a problem we should address?

Is it rational that producing what people need to eat, so #1 on the list of jobs that should absolutely be done, gets people barely enough to live on? I don't think it is.

i get that maybe you can make a decent living farming if it's mostly automated large scale farming. As I pointed out, yes, that does exist but it's not sustainable, which I think is too innocuous-sounding for a word that means actively destroying the environment.

So you get zero incentive for producing what people need to live, and huge incentives for destroying other things people need to live.
I think it's pretty clear that as economic system this is completely messed up.

[Travis B.]

The matter with that is that, on one hand, if farming less intensively is less efficient, then that means that more land will be used for farming, and the simple act of converting land into farmland means destroying the environment, but at the same time there are aspects of intensive farming that specifically harm the environment (beyond the simple use of land itself) such as the use of pesticides that harm pollinators that need to be dealt with one way or another. Ideally farming would be as efficient as possible, as that means less land used, without harming pollinators or like.

[rotting bones]

If more people work in it, it can be less work for each individual farmer. Regarding collectivized and easily copiable goods, we can also make it pay more. But the thing is:

1. Parceling out land doesn't make this happen. To coordinate labor in this way, you have to collectivize farm work one way or another.

2. Creating a large class of small landowners is a self-defeating strategy for leftists. Capitalist farmers effectively relying on peasants and slave labor will accuse a society of small leftist farmers of being "poor". Half the time, this will sound correct to most of the people in your society, who will decide to get ahead by stabbing others in the back, and they will call this act a "love of country".

3. Also, automating work doesn't necessarily destroy the environment. Capitalists destroy the environment whether they automate work or not because the capitalist economy incentivizes them to. It's not clear to me that collective owners will be incentivized to destroy their livelihood in the same way once they are not competing under the same "graph go up" metric.

[rotting bones]

Also, it was the West Wing episode California 47th that references Communist farmers in America.

I'm apparently starting to hallucinate.

[Travis B.]

I am personally against going and taking big agribusiness farms and divvying them into little parcels to give out to individual farmers and instead am for collectivizing the big agribusiness farms so they are owned and managed by the same farmworkers who worked at them when they were owned by the big agribusinesses. By this farmworker ownership and self-management of farmland and the capital (e.g. heavy equipment) used to work it can be achieved without giving up the efficiencies in scale entailed by such large farm.

[Raphael]

That still does not address the problem Nort brought up, is that relatively few people choose to be farmers if given a choice, for good reason.

One huge problem: it's a lot of work and it doesn't pay nearly enough.
And I'd say, regardless of how many farmers there should be and all that, isn't that a problem we should address?

Is it rational that producing what people need to eat, so #1 on the list of jobs that should absolutely be done, gets people barely enough to live on? I don't think it is.

i get that maybe you can make a decent living farming if it's mostly automated large scale farming. As I pointed out, yes, that does exist but it's not sustainable, which I think is too innocuous-sounding for a word that means actively destroying the environment.

So you get zero incentive for producing what people need to live, and huge incentives for destroying other things people need to live.
I think it's pretty clear that as economic system this is completely messed up.

Hm. Regarding the labor issue: Perhaps we could do a less extreme, more watered-down version of what I did in one of my conworlding scenarios?

The idea would be five or six or seven or eight years of mandatory Shitty Jobs Service, starting either when people turn 18 or when they finish secondary education, whichever happens later. Shitty Jobs Service could be farm work, or changing bedpans in hospitals or nursing homes, or frying food in cheap eateries, or construction work, or maintaining sewers, or military service, or whatever. You could state your preferences, but without any certainty that you'd get to do what you want.

It could be justified by pointing out that jobs like that need to be done, and everyone benefits from them being done, and they're highly unpleasant to do, and therefore, a society that makes everyone who's medically capable do some of those jobs for a while is more just than a society in which a lot of people can go through their lives without ever doing any of those jobs, while still benefitting from the work of those who do them. It might teach young people both a sense of responsibility, and an appreciation for things that they might otherwise be thoughtless about: I guess, though I don't know it from any kind of personal experience, that once you've done a serious amount of farm work, you might never look at the food you eat in quite the same way again, and the same might apply to equivalent things related to the other jobs I listed, too.

Or perhaps it wouldn't be legally mandatory - there might be an intentional reshuffling of social norms, so that doing something like this in your young adulthood would be generally seen as the default option, which only a few people would opt out of.

Or, alternatively, we could try to contact Ogorodé.

[Travis B.]

Forcing everyone to do shit work for at least five years seems like a bit much to me. And while I am for practically-universal military service in the new society, I would be for the period where people are active duty to be much shorter than that (e.g. a year tops) with people afterwards becoming reservists. (And my reasoning for practically-universal military service is specifically to keep the military from being a small self-selected minority practically capable of seizing power via coup d'etat.)

[Raphael]

Forcing everyone to do shit work for at least five years seems like a bit much to me.

Well, arguably the smaller evil compared to de facto forcing some people, but not all people, to do shit work for a lot longer than that.

[Travis B.]

Forcing everyone to do shit work for at least five years seems like a bit much to me.

Well, arguably the smaller evil compared to de facto forcing some people, but not all people, to do shit work for a lot longer than that.

Still at least five years seems to be an awfully long time to subject the vast majority of the population to particularly shitty jobs. If you're making nearly everyone do such jobs, you could probably get away with making that period significantly shorter.

[rotting bones]

This assumption that everyone hates farming sounds surreal to me. My social media is saturated with people stuck in cities selling online ads who fantasize about making a living planting crops instead. The issue is that the opportunity doesn't exist under capitalism without turning yourself into the exploited farm hand character you hear about on the news.

[Raphael]

Forcing everyone to do shit work for at least five years seems like a bit much to me.

Well, arguably the smaller evil compared to de facto forcing some people, but not all people, to do shit work for a lot longer than that.

Still at least five years seems to be an awfully long time to subject the vast majority of the population to particularly shitty jobs. If you're making nearly everyone do such jobs, you could probably get away with making that period significantly shorter.

I'd have to do research to find out how long it would have to be in an average modern country. I tried to err on the side of caution, which, IMO, in this context, means the side of longer terms.

[Raphael]

This assumption that everyone hates farming sounds surreal to me. My social media is saturated with people stuck in cities selling online ads who fantasize about making a living planting crops instead. The issue is that the opportunity doesn't exist under capitalism without turning yourself into the exploited farm hand character you hear about on the news.

People might like the idea of doing farm work until they actually try to do a serious amount of it.

[rotting bones]

People might like the idea of doing farm work until they actually try to do a serious amount of it.

Many of them grew up doing farm labor. The farm couldn't compete and was bought out. They got a job in the city. The organization was downsized. Now they're stuck in freelance marketing and a Stardew Valley addiction. This is the majority experience I'm familiar with.

[Raphael]

People might like the idea of doing farm work until they actually try to do a serious amount of it.

Many of them grew up doing farm labor. The farm couldn't compete and was bought out. They got a job in the city. The organization was downsized. Now they're stuck in freelance marketing and a Stardew Valley addiction. This is the majority experience I'm familiar with.

OK, thank you for informing me.