Re: Reply to: Re: Reply to: Re: "Second cont

[boddhisatva <kbevans@xxxxxxxxx>]

                Mr. Flanders,


        The problem is that agri-business is the reality, and small farmers
just provide political cover for agri-business.


        I'm glad you brought up milk.  When Canadian quotas used to go
down, my cousins and uncles would go nuts, but what are you going to do?
Food producers (cheese, etc.) and diversified agri-business concerns have
a lot more political money to spend than small farmers - even in a country
with a relatively large rural (if not farming) population.  THEY set the
prices.  We TRY to subsidize the family farmer, but help the agri-business
AND the food producing company.  Meanwhile, dairy herds are an enormous
investment, often requiring massive debt.  The small producer absolutely
MUST go for maximum yield.  He has no hedge against fluctuating milk
prices, because he cannot afford to take the capital loss on cows, land,
or equipment in bad years.



        Look, I'm not saying these people are Kulaks.  I'm simply saying
that corporations are the dominant mode of production, for dialectical
reasons, and that we have to evolve THAT model, not retreat into some
fantasy.  The communal model is clearly the way to go.  If you look at it
economicly, the Mennonites are like a publicly (communally) held
"corporation" whose main business is agriculture, but who also dabble in
restaurants, retail stores and crafts.  They have, as a group, organized
their financial structure around long-term investment over large amounts
of land.  They have mechanisms in place to accommodate fluctuations in
agricultural prices, and they spread (with roof-raisings, etc.) the cost
of capital investment throughout the corporation.  They are NOT
single-product, small-business owners WEDDED to private property and
competition, with no mechanism to combat the tendency towards
over-capitalization.



        Small farmers are not bad people, quite the opposite.  They are,
however, an anachronism in a world that (as we insist over the denials of
the bourgeoisie) is logically constructed so as to be dominated by the
corporate speculator.


        We can't have it two ways.  Either corporations have made the logic
of proprietary commerce fundamentally destructive to the public good, or we
can reform proprietary commerce.  Either the earth is meant to feed the most
people with the least labor, or the earth is meant to feed its private owners
first.


        I believe we have to spread the ownership of land as wide as market
logic will allow, creating a shareholder proletariat, until such time as
sufficient social harmony allows all capital to be turned over to the whole
community.





        peace





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