Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[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.

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.

well, no, it doesn't, but it's not hard to, if we ask relative to what, exactly:

see? let f be the proportion of farmers in a country or society or whatever, and d(f) being how many people, given a choice, would be a farmer, d(f) is going to be a function of a bunch of things, including the alternatives and how well farming pays and the availability of land and so on and so forth, and sure, d(f) is probably no higher than d(rockstar) or d(youtuber), but it's probably around d(callcenter_worker) or d(mall_cleaner). as it is, I suspect f is lower than d(f), not higher. Especially in countries with high industrialization of the agricultural system, as it is in the US.

historically, it's as accurate to say that f went down because peasants went to the cities seeking new opportunities (right wing academics generally say this) as it is to say they were driven out by a strong drop in the demand for agricultural labour and the concurrent emmiseration of rural peoples who were, as it happens, the majority of everyone at the time (left wing academics tend to say this other thing). sure, sure, technology increased production, but it also did so in a concrete, specific way: machines *can* be used for many things, and how humans *do* use them is the result of many sociological factors, including, obviously, who is in power.

So land owners did not just industrialize, they industrialized in concrete ways, ways designed to extract as much units of currency from the land as technically possible while at the same time spending as little units of currency as possible. to my knowledge, food didn't become that much cheaper during and immediately after the industrial revolution... and in all likelyhood people grew approximately about as much food as people ate, with some waste. what happened wasn't that so much more food was produced, it was that said food could be produced in vast quantities with fewer and fewer people, gravely harming most people's lives.

And like, sure, you could have done it in a different way! if you have land ownership spread out, then the incentive is for each farmer to make his own life easier: sure, producing more taters and maybe hiring a fewer farmhands, but also getting better tools: pumps and motocultivators, a cotton making machine so he doesn't have to pick cotton by hand.... ah, but when land ownership is very concentrated (as it inevitably happens in capitalism), well, the incentives are different. you don't care anymore about how pleasant the work is, you care about how many people you can lay off.

as to for good reason, i don't know. it's gotta be better than pumping gas at your nearest copec, but it's probably worse than regional HR manager at some multinational or other.

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And sure, it pays badly, but that's because of concrete factors. I don't think you can get around it being physical labour, but that's not so bad. I know a bit about how farming works in this little southern country: in a few words, it's tough as fuck, but it pays a lot better than most any other "unqualified" job, and most of the profit is made by the people in logistics, distribution, and commercialization. you can buy a watermelon for 1 luca (about a dollar) down where people grow 'em, not two hours from downtown santiago by car, or you can buy it for 3 to 5 lucas at a supermarket. if those people, the growers, got 2 lucas per watermelon instead of one, they'd make a pretty good living.

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.

i know, right? sure, farm work kind of sucks, but all work kind of sucks in capitalism. sheesh, cashiers in my country wear diapers, and amazon warehouse guys piss in bottles. It's not like everyone's who's not a farmer works some cozy office job with benefits and 90k a year

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it's not clear farming less intensively is less efficient: in fact, it looks like the opposite is true: the corollary to "small farms make .3 of the food with .12 of the land" is "big farms make 0.7 of the food on .88 of the land". and like, think about it, there's nothing magical that feeds the earth spirit about a big combine, or monocrops, or pesticides, or fertilizers. anyone can apply pesticides, it's just a single guy can apply pesticide to vast swathes of land if it's all a monocrop and he has a plane, and he showers it with so much that it's impossible one plant got left out. plants will grow as long as concrete conditions are optimal: soil moisture, sunlight, temperature, humidity, lack of parasites, and those conditions take some work to maintain. maybe factory farms just minimize payroll for a given per-meter productivity, which is about how fast plants can grow, well tended, in a given bit of land. there's a lot of research to the effect of small farms being *more* productive than large ones, though i'm not super up to date on it.

[zompist]

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.

We don't need more land, we need to eat less beef. Worldwide, 38% of crops are grown to feed livestock.

(Note, we don't all need to be vegans. You didn't say this, but historians and pundits going back to Adam Smith often get this wrong: not all land is suitable for crops, some is only suitable for pasture.)

[zompist]

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.

This reminds me, I'm afraid, of Aldous Huxley's assumption that an advanced nation would always need a caste of "Epsilon semi-morons" to do the menial work. I prefer Wilde's belief (which looks a lot more tenable 134 years later) that machines should do that as much as possible.

Your Shitty Jobs Service seems to unconsciously reflect the middle-class idea that menial work is shitty and there's nothing to be done about that. A lot of people would consider construction, or nursing, or restaurant work, or plumbing, to be pretty good jobs.

We have a version of your system already; it's called "teenage". I had some menial work as a teen: janitor at a nursing home, moving, restaurant work, dishwashing at school. I wouldn't have wanted to do any of those forever, but I don't look down on the people who did. The thing to do with crappy jobs is make them less crappy. For instance, the nursing home took the view that everyone who interacted with the residents was important and should get to know them, so even us summer janitors were invited to the weekly care review.

The thing is, if you bracket off a class of jobs as shitty, only for young people who won't be in it for long, you pretty much remove any motivation to upgrade it, automate it, or even take it seriously. They won't be done well and yet they'll be done the same way forever. Who's going to design a sewer maintenance machine if there is a new class of noobs assigned to do it every year?

For one modern society on Almea, I had people working menial jobs one year, "nice" jobs the next. This both spread out the softer jobs, and motivated people to make improvements to the harder ones. But the system required ktuvoks to run, so I wouldn't suggest it'd work on Earth.

[rotting bones]

Torco: One major reason why people wanted to live in towns in the past is because there was more exposure to culture. With the Internet, I'm not sure this will be an issue.

As for efficiency, the efficiency I'm worried about is not from the standpoint of production. (Honestly, I'm concerned large farms might be producing less under capitalism in order to prevent food prices from going into free fall. I know of companies buying out small farms and simply not using them.) I'm worried that the price of food will be higher for consumers without collective organization.

[malloc]

Anecdotes of communist farmers aside, I have consistently read over the years that rural areas are more conservative than urban ones. That certainly tracks with my own experience: St Louis city has socialist clubs and pride parades while such things are emphatically taboo in the suburbs and coutryside here. I fear that ruralizing society will also make more reactionary in its political and cultural climate.

[rotting bones]

Anecdotes of communist farmers aside, I have consistently read over the years that rural areas are more conservative than urban ones. That certainly tracks with my own experience: St Louis city has socialist clubs and pride parades while such things are emphatically taboo in the suburbs and coutryside here. I fear that ruralizing society will also make more reactionary in its political and cultural climate.

CPI (M) would never have come to power in Bengal without the farmers. Maybe you should investigate the underlying historical causes why farmers in Missouri see the left as an enemy. Considering Trump won the general election, maybe there was something about the left's backing of neoliberalism that made it easier for the right to paint them as the enemy for both farmers and the general population. Maybe the right's use of religious propaganda and patriarchal social structures play a role. Instead of essentializing farmers, try to think of alternative social structures that harmonize farming with progressive politics. Because let me tell you, without farming, we'd all be dead. From a Marxist perspective, it's the farmers who hold the essential worker role. If you can't live without farmers, the emancipatory position is to let them do what they want.

[malloc]

Maybe you should investigate the underlying historical causes why farmers in Missouri see the left as an enemy. Considering Trump won the general election, maybe there was something about the left's backing of neoliberalism that made it easier for the right to paint them as the enemy for both farmers and the general population.

They consider the left their enemy because it defends ethnic and religious minorities, LGBT people, and women. They have said precisely that repeatedly. They are thrilled that Trump is persecuting all the people they hate and they look forward to the day when they have a white Christian ethnostate. Certainly it has nothing to do with the American left backing neoliberalism. The last time anyone tried to reform healthcare to adopt more socialistic provisions, they lost their minds and started the Tea Party movement.

Because let me tell you, without farming, we'd all be dead. From a Marxist perspective, it's the farmers who hold the essential worker role. If you can't live without farmers, the emancipatory position is to let them do what they want.

The emancipatory position is defending women, LGBT people, and ethnic minorities against the "radical intolerance of the peasantry" as you once aptly put it. Sure we cannot dispense with agriculture entirely, but we should still favor urbanization over ruralization.

[rotting bones]

They consider the left their enemy because it defends ethnic and religious minorities, LGBT people, and women. They have said precisely that repeatedly. They are thrilled that Trump is persecuting all the people they hate and they look forward to the day when they have a white Christian ethnostate. Certainly it has nothing to do with the American left backing neoliberalism. The last time anyone tried to reform healthcare to adopt more socialistic provisions, they lost their minds and started the Tea Party movement.

Isn't most of the farm work done by exploited ethnic minorities? You're again conflating farm workers with the petite bourgeoisie.

[zompist]

Isn't most of the farm work done by exploited ethnic minorities?

No, most of the farm work is done by owners and their families. In 2000, there were 2.1 million self-employed farmers and 1.1 million hired workers.

As for why farm owners tend to be conservative, it's largely because they are small business owners. The median household income from farming is larger, by 21%, than the median household income.

It all gets complicated by the fact that most farming families also have non-farm income.

Whatever Marx said about farmers in 1848 is likely not relevant to US farmers today.

Trump's deportations are causing a labor shortage for farming. Very likely this will reduce, not increase, the number of family farms. Only large industrial farms can afford mechanization or negotiating visa requirements for temporary workers.

[rotting bones]

No, most of the farm work is done by owners and their families. In 2000, there were 2.1 million self-employed farmers and 1.1 million hired workers.

As for why farm owners tend to be conservative, it's largely because they are small business owners. The median household income from farming is larger, by 21%, than the median household income.

It all gets complicated by the fact that most farming families also have non-farm income.

...

Trump's deportations are causing a labor shortage for farming. Very likely this will reduce, not increase, the number of family farms. Only large industrial farms can afford mechanization or negotiating visa requirements for temporary workers.

What is the difference in the kinds of work done by owners vs hired workers?

I heard a lot of American farming is only profitable with exploited laborers (edit: which I see you added), so I'm worried the "work" done by the owners falls under the category of management. It's also possible the farmers simply lose money and vote for the right to bail them out in various ways.

Whatever Marx said about farmers in 1848 is likely not relevant to US farmers today.

The petite bourgeoisie is defined as small business owners.

I will trust contemporary theorists if one of them ever gives me a reason to. As far as I can tell, there are two types of contemporary theorists: those incapable of solidarity (Keynesians and those to their right) and those incapable of abstraction (socialists and those to their left). The political right is of course both.

[rotting bones]

I would also be interested in how the number of hired workers rose and fell under various administrations, especially what the number is after Trump 2.

[zompist]

What is the difference in the kinds of work done by owners vs hired workers?

I heard a lot of American farming is only profitable with exploited laborers (edit: which I see you added), so I'm worried the "work" done by the owners falls under the category of management.

I think if you're expecting that small business owners sit in an office and loftily bid the hired help do all the hired work, you've never seen a small business.

Surely you've read in this thread that farm work is hard? It's also highly seasonal. There's too much work some months, not enough at others. Watching crops grow does not require a bunch of hired help. Harvesting generally does.

Is this a great system? Probably not, but no farming system has ever been all lovely all the time.

I would also be interested in how the number of hired workers rose and fell under various administrations, especially what the number is after Trump 2.

The USDA page I found said that hired workers have been at the same level (1.1 milllion) from 1990 to 2020.

From 1950 to 1990 the number of both farm operators and hired workers plummeted. In 1950 there were 7.6 million farm operators, 2.3 million hired workers.

[rotting bones]

I think if you're expecting that small business owners sit in an office and loftily bid the hired help do all the hired work, you've never seen a small business.

Surely you've read in this thread that farm work is hard? It's also highly seasonal. There's too much work some months, not enough at others. Watching crops grow does not require a bunch of hired help. Harvesting generally does.

Is this a great system? Probably not, but no farming system has ever been all lovely all the time.

By management, I'm mainly thinking of administration, accounting, operating machinery and other relatively pleasant parts of the job (even when the work involves farming rather than overseeing), leaving a lot of the grunt work to hired workers. I'm trying to conceptualize what that video I linked to before says about farming in America:

This video says people are willing to work on farms if there are chances for advancement: https://youtu.be/zdWrHb8b-c0

Having said that, it's true that I have zero knowledge about running a small business.

The USDA page I found said that hired workers have been at the same level (1.1 milllion) from 1990 to 2020.

From 1950 to 1990 the number of both farm operators and hired workers plummeted. In 1950 there were 7.6 million farm operators, 2.3 million hired workers.

Thank you.

[rotting bones]

IIRC, this farm runs one of the most recommended progressive channels on YouTube: https://www.parkrosepermaculture.com/

[malloc]

IIRC, this farm runs one of the most recommended progressive channels on YouTube: https://www.parkrosepermaculture.com/

Sure but she's also a college graduate living in a major city, which makes her quite distinct from most farmers.

[rotting bones]

Sure but she's also a college graduate living in a major city, which makes her quite distinct from most farmers.

Does this mean you think free higher education would help create more progressive farmers?

[Ares Land]

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.

Yes, I agree. It's better, for all sort of reasons, if farms aren't one-family operations anyway.

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.

I'm not adverse to automation as long as it doesn't destroy the environment really. I agree that it's in large part a matter of wrong incentives.

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.

Size is in itself a problem for farms, huge expenses of monoculture aren't great for the environment.
What I'd suggest is federations or associations of smaller farms, so resources, investments or know-how can be shared.

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.

I tend to object to mandatory service. I'd like to question the assumption that those are shitty jobs.
Some of these I think we can exclude right away. Most Western countries have professional military forces; people in the military seem to be pretty proud of it (from the outside, it doesn't look like a bad carrier paths). I know a number of people in construction jobs. It's not a bad career either -- I think office jobs like the one I have is their idea of hell.

As for other jobs you mention -- let's talk about nursing home jobs, as a break from farming -- caregivers or nursing assistants. The first thing that comes ot mind is that they don't pay much, and the hours can be pretty bad. It seems to be a lot would be achieved if they were paid decently with decent compensation (the hours can't be helped)

A lot of our judgement on what jobs are shitty is subjective. If you're an hedge fund managers, you can expect to be comfortably paid, and you've done something of yourself. If you change adult diapers, well, the pay is bad and people will kind of look down on you. Yet one of these is extremely useful, the other probably a net loss to society. Pretty messed up values here.

An alternative suggestion would be to provide ways to switch careers and change jobs. One common point to the examples you listed is that they're all back-breaking work and that health trouble is to be expected ten or twenty years down the line. To some extent you can alleviate the health risk (at the cost of relatively lower productivity) and we should of course to that; but, say, a caregiver in a nursing will probably have to switch to less physical work after a while, and this is something that should be taken into account.

Generally once you picked a career, switching to something else later in life is difficult -- but over a 40+ years career it's normal that people capabilities or wishes change.

I prefer Wilde's belief (which looks a lot more tenable 134 years later) that machines should do that as much as possible.

I agree. But one surprising bit is that there are menial jobs that we can't, or don't want to automate. Can nursing homes be staffed by robots? Do we even want them to? Sounds dismal to me.

Surely you've read in this thread that farm work is hard? It's also highly seasonal. There's too much work some months, not enough at others. Watching crops grow does not require a bunch of hired help. Harvesting generally does.

Is this a great system? Probably not, but no farming system has ever been all lovely all the time.

Yes, farming that it requires a lot of temporary, hired help around the harvest. Conditions range from horrific to pleasant.
The wine harvest, depending on the owner, can range from 'immigrant slave labor' to something people take time off their job for and look forward to (work during the day, huge party and wine in the evenings, even bigger party and more wine at the end, make a fair bit of money out of it, what's not to like?)

Anecdotes of communist farmers aside, I have consistently read over the years that rural areas are more conservative than urban ones. That certainly tracks with my own experience: St Louis city has socialist clubs and pride parades while such things are emphatically taboo in the suburbs and coutryside here. I fear that ruralizing society will also make more reactionary in its political and cultural climate.

That's generally true. But I agree with rotting bones that we also have to look into the underlying causes. Smelling manure doesn't automatically turn people into reactionaries, there must be some sort of reason.

One incomplete answer is that historically left-wing parties focussed on industry, and largely ignored the rural world, indeed tended to dismiss it as a backwards embarassment.

The natural default mode of human beings is conservativism. Add to that a disconnect between rural and city life -- it's all too easy for propagandists right-wing media to paint a rather lurid picture of what goes on in the cities.
I should add that I've lived both in huge cities and very rural area and in my experience, ignorance and stereotypes go both ways.

I believe people are personally responsible for the hateful views they may have, so I don't mean to absolve anyone or anything. Still, it must be pointed that it's hard for people to sympathize with the views of people who don't know or care about how they live (again, explanation, not apology).

In any case, I don't think the strategy of kind of ignoring rural area works. Consider the American tendency to ignore the flyover states, or the French tendency to assume nothing of importance happens outside Paris inner city limits. Both have come to bite us in the ass, hard.

[rotting bones]

There's also the fact that capitalist policies have made operating small businesses increasingly tenuous in recent years. Unfortunately, small business owners are too dumb to see it that way. They associate social effects that destroy small business with the "left" and "big government". They see the right's promises to bail them out as their lifeline. I have seen award-winning documentaries on this. (The funniest one was IIRC The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. IIRC this video provides some context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw)

[zompist]

I prefer Wilde's belief (which looks a lot more tenable 134 years later) that machines should do that as much as possible.

I agree. But one surprising bit is that there are menial jobs that we can't, or don't want to automate. Can nursing homes be staffed by robots? Do we even want them to? Sounds dismal to me.

I think you answered this yourself in your reply to Raphael: nursing isn't a shitty job. In general, caring for humans is something humans do well, and caring for old people is both laudable and something advanced countries are going to need a lot of in this century.

Ideally society should think hard about what jobs shouldn't be automated, and not automate those. And make allowances for the fact that many people do like manual work and many people hate office work.

I recall a doctor saying once-- while cleaning out my ears-- that he didn't find such things disgusting. James Herriot (a veterinarian) wrote about how much he enjoyed, well, extremely personal interventions in a cow. Again ideally, decisions about what jobs are good and bad shouldn't be made by people who only like office work.

[Raphael]

I will trust contemporary theorists if one of them ever gives me a reason to. A

Just because you don't trust contemporary theorists, it doesn't mean that you have to trust Marx. You could always try to come up with your own theory.

There's also the fact that capitalist policies have made operating small businesses increasingly tenuous in recent years. Unfortunately, small business owners are too dumb to see it that way. They associate social effects that destroy small business with the "left" and "big government". They see the right's promises to bail them out as their lifeline.

Given your stance towards religion, you might not like hearing this word as a compliment, but, well, as they say, Preach!