• 0 Posts
  • 372 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 18th, 2023
  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubto Memes of Production@quokk.au•another world is possibleEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    Workers are better at managing resources than bosses who haven’t spent a day in the field.

    But a worker who works in e.g. growing potatoes is not better at managing distribution across multiple counties. Those are different task areas, and logistics networks are not flat organizations, they require management.

    If you’ll re-read my previous post you’ll see that my point is mostly about infrastructure, not about the expertise in producing any particular food. It’s the infrastructure that allows production and distribution scale, to the point where agriculture represents ~1% of labor. A lot of people (99%) are able to spend their time doing other productive things besides growing food, and are still able to eat. That is a highly successful system.

    Food is wasted due to being commercially unviable.

    Food is also wasted due to logistics problems. It’s great that you can produce so much food that you can give some of it away, but can you give some of it away two states over? The people who would most benefit from the excess food you produce don’t live in your zip code.

    I find the argument strange that under anarchy there would be no technology or infrastructure.

    1. I said nothing about technology. I’m addressing that here and I’m going to ignore it as a straw man.
    2. Infrastructure never works as a flat organizational structure. It requires management and oversight. It requires overall design, a broad range of skillsets, and long-term maintenance. At some point someone has to make decisions about which experts put their expertise where and when, and which spare parts are most critical for which areas, and you cannot wait for the entire community affected by those decisions to make a collective decision. The infrastructure will rot before useful choices are made. Someone (one) must make management decisions about where other people spend their time and effort on which resources.
  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubto Memes of Production@quokk.au•another world is possibleEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    This is part of the reason anarchists believe there would be less violence under anarchy. Withholding food from another person would not be allowed,

    Er, and who would enforce this?

    Agreed. Anarchists don’t claim to be able to eliminate violence. That would be almost impossible.

    Also, the measures necessary to enforce it at large scale would probably be unethical.

    Food is withheld from millions of people in our current system simply because they cannot afford it.

    Well OK, this is getting more into socialism or communism, but the next obvious question is where is this food coming from, if people are not required to pay for its production?

    Even if you want some sort of idealized currency-free economy, it costs resources to grow food and to distribute it to the people who want to eat it (land, water, infrastructure, time, labor, etc). Does everyone contribute to food production with their own labor? Is this a purely agrarian society? Is food withheld from people who do not contribute labor?

    Large-scale farming as it is done today depends highly on the socioeconomic structure around it. Sure, there’s a lot of waste, but the system also supports a large population who do not have to participate in agriculture in order to eat.

    While I’m sure other systems are possible, I’m not sure that other systems can operate at a similar scale. Which is to say that the impression I get from everyone who argues for such things is that they carry some form of idealized “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” agrarian society in their head, some romantic idea about small-scale farming and simple life. Mostly these are people who have never worked on a farm themselves. The whole idea sounds regressive to me, practically tradlife conservative.

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubto Memes of Production@quokk.au•another world is possibleEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    Oh, I believe that individual humans are capable of treating other humans with compassion and otherwise being generally well-behaved. There are even people who would sooner die than defend themselves against violence.

    But I don’t believe that human society at large is capable of existing without violence. I believe that all of our recorded history demonstrates this quite thoroughly.

    Also, I will tell you that you don’t know what you yourself are capable of until you’ve gone more than three days without food with uncertainty about when or how you’re going to eat next (fasting by choice, which you know will end with the opportunity to eat again, doesn’t count).