We absolutely need people to acquire experience for developing resilient organization that can be generalized to other locations, and shared across broader coalitions.
I think unfortunately a stage of deconstruction is often needed for each individual, if any space it to open for consciousness to take hold.
There is a curious tension between the prudence of conceiving a coherent plan versus the aspiration to foster a politics of participation.
I am often criticized, when advocating for transformative change, for not proffering a vision. It seems everyone is expecting to be led, as though conditioned to be no more than a follower.
It represents a profound challenge to transform our society away from adherence to fixed ideals and toward expression of individual agency.
Any such idea is possible in principle, but ultimately no configuration will be actual except the one constructed through general participation. Variation may be considerable across locality and over time.
I think anarchists may support representation in the sense of delegation, but I have understood that most would be reluctant to uphold a representative body in which would be vested permanent power.
Capital and the state are two sides of the same coin. The state protects capital, and capital constructs the state.
Anarchism is the earliest socialist tradition, and the later concept of the workers’ state has always been problematic.
I feel doubtful that your criticism appropriately targets anarchism.
Anarchists rarely utilize or support voting, nor any prescribed system that would supersede the evolving consensus of a group.
Generally, a system is stable, if not by enforcement from a state, then only by being upheld from consensus.
The topic of discussion is Georgism, and its relation to leftism.
I did address the general sense of your question, in relation to such a context.
Would you explain why such a contribution seems to you as inadequate?
It is meaningless to assert as an objective simply creating a society that is “better”.
Further, not all leftists defend land commodification.
Not all leftists defend markets.
Not all leftists defend money.
Not all leftists defend the state.
Final objectives are less valuable than criticism of structure and strategies for transformation.
As I have suggested, by my own characterization at least, the entry point for leftism is criticism of the class structure of society, embodied in the social construct of private property, that is, particular resources or assets being utilized socially but controlled privately.
What would you recommend instead or as a change?
You objected that supply of produced food is sufficient for the whole population, though such is already explained in the brief text of the post.
I explained that distribution is inequitable, to such a degree that many remain deprived, though such also was explained.
You also objected that capitalism has never been implemented in practice, though the obvious motive of the post, within the context of a tradition of criticizing capitalism, lasting now for approximately two hundred years, is to discuss actual problems that have been ongoing.
Indeed, the name for capitalism was given to describe a social system that had emerged, after it had emerged. If it never had emerged, then of course it never would have been identified or described.
What problems are you finding now, located in the post itself?
In both cases, oversight is not contingent on some formalized rule of value transfer.
It is always possible to review the current circumstances, and simply to make a suitable decision.
Does Amazon manage warehouses, and if so, does it charge the warehouse to ensure efficient usage and to prevent mismanagement?
Despite the differences that Amazon is private and hierarchical, should a different approach, respecting the question, be preferred for a system that is public and lateral?
Is land tax a practice that was unknown before the emergence of Georgism, or that is supported exclusively by Georgists?
Are you referring to your question about my ideals or values, respecting distribution of benefit from land usage?
I have framed the conversation around my skepticism that Georgism meaningfully contributes to leftism or functions as a leftist tendency.
I feel the general subject is not bound to my personal feelings or preferences.
Certainly, my characterization is that any movements or values are credibly leftist only if they at least express skepticism over any particular assets or resources, including lands, being utilized socially and also toward benefit that is private.
I thought you may have contributed to the down votes, but in fact it also appears that I have been targeted personally by organized voting.
The fundamental definition of capitalism is that all means of production are privately owned.
The reason I say that it’s theoretical and hypothetical is that you won’t find any real economies where that’s the case.
When we discuss capitalism, we are discussing existing systems that are based on the capitalist mode of production.
We have no interest in fairy tales.
I’m not sure why you would site “product stratification” as a requirement of capitalism.
I believe you misquoted the text. I apologize if I originally submitted an inaccurate representation of the intended language.
Capitalism produces forces that impose systemic inequity across the population, and also, capitalism would collapse if somehow the inequity were resolved.
Thus, capitalism produces and requires inequity, on a massive scale.
Most modern economic theory does involve marginalization, but probably not the way you think.
We are concerned with facts, not just wishes.
The requirement is just that either consumers have different preference curves or producers have different production abilities.
Marginalization is cohorts of a population being systemically separated, disempowered, and disenfranchised.
Deprivation isn’t a requirement of capitalism either. It’s a basic assumption of economics. The idea is that we have unbounded capacity to consume but bounded capacity to produce.
Again, we discuss reality. Capitalism depends on cohorts of the population lacking access to the more desirable opportunities of employment available to others, thereby becoming forced to accept less undesirable employment. It also depends on most of the population needing to be employed to earn the means of survival. Wealthy business owners require no employment to survive, because they survive from the labor provided by their employees.
Thus, capitalist society is structured by a class disparity between owner and worker, and of further systemic stratification across the working class.
Asserting the intractable necessity of similar stratification for any system represents an argument from ignorance.
difference between Communism and Capitalism is in how they prioritize using limited resources.
The difference is based on control over production. Naturally, if workers control production, then they direct it toward their own interests, as the whole public, not the interests of a narrow cohort of society that has consolidated immense wealth and power.
You can cite a single statistic on food scarcity but the data is very clear that we’re living in an era of unprecedented food excess.
Food scarcity is the degree to which certain cohorts of the population have inadequate or insecure access to food, not the total amount of food with respect to need.
Statistics are easy to find if you search.
If you look at data sets that cover more than a few decades you’ll see strong trends of decreased malnutrition, both within the US and around the world.
Much has improved over time, however, precarity and insecurity have exacerbated by most measures in recent years and decades.
The US subsidizes food production. That’s generally a good thing since it improves food security.
The relationship is weak. Food security depends on stability and equitability of distribution. A society producing enough food to support the population is considered as resilient, but such an achievement is not sufficient to ensure security for the entire population.
Inequities in distribution are harmful to the population, by producing food insecurity.
The US deals with this by having the government buy up excess food at guaranteed minimum prices.
Much food is wasted.
Retailers discard food to keep prices inflated, even as many remain hungry. The practices you are describing, of government making purchases to keep prices stable and also distributing according to need, for households unable to meet the retail price, are not occurring in practice, to any meaningful degree, to address the problems.
In the US, over one in ten are food insecure.
If the state (a public body) exerts control over a market, you cannot call it a capitalist act, you can not blame capitalism for it.
There is no such thing as a “capitalist act”.
Capitalism is the total societal system by which production and distribution are organized.
The observation that the government is providing direction for such activities is not one that confers any value to the objection.
You have to actually tell me why…
The government is supporting the capitalist system, and operating within it, not separate from it, or antagonistic to it.
My point is coherent, and well sourced, yet you have never actually pointed to anything that can falsify what I’m saying.
Your claim is unfalsifiable.
You impose an assumption of some distinction of acts that are capitalist versus not capitalist, but such a distinction has no conceptual coherence.
All acts follow from the systems in which they occur.
Capitalism is the system of organization in which acts are occurring under current consideration. Within a different system, the acts occurring naturally would be different. None may be separated, as not part of the system in which they occur.
Private producers are within the system of capitalism. Consumers are within the system of capitalism. Governments and states are within the system of capitalism.
A social body outside of capitalism would be one occurring in a society that has transformed beyond capitalism, or in which capitalism had not yet emerged.
Capitalism is the private ownership and control of the means of production.
Check.
However, based on your other remarks, it would be well to affirm the more precise framing, that capitalism is the system of production and distribution characterized by private ownership of production.
Means of production includes the markets that distribute milk.
Markets are not means of production in themselves, but rather are a system of exchange utilized by the private owners, and imposed on workers and consumers, with support from the state.
If the state controls distribution, then the distribution cannot be called capitalist.
The state is not controlling distribution.
Markets are identified as a convergence of free choices among private entities against rules and systems affirmed and enforced by the state, and often also affirmed, to some degree, as legitimate, by many of the private participants.
The state also participates in markets, and some choices may be determined as shaping them for specific objectives that are independent of the private benefit of any single entity.
Canada owns the means of distribution.
Means of production under government control have character both of public and private ownership. However, in Canada, agriculture is controlled by agribusiness, and participation also may include some farmers of small plots who work their own land, and purchase supplies and equipment from agribusiness firms. Many such farmers may employ additional hands to help them work the land they own, making them small business owners who control means of production.
I am not aware of farms under government control in Canada. I feel doubtful that any are operated as such, but even so, agriculture is generally private, in the truest sense, of being owned by businesses and families.
Even if every farm were owned by the government in Canada, the industry would remain as integrated into the broader economy, and the national economy as integrated with the global.
If you disagree that Canada’s distribution method is not capitalist,
Canada is a capitalist society. Enterprise, industry, productive lands, and other productive assets are controlled by private owners. There is no dispute.
Canada - the state, not the private - is the one who decided milk should be dumped.
The government protects private interests. Nominally the state protects the public, but in practice, the state protects business more than workers.
A public body exerted control over the market, leading to a specific decision to destroy market product.
Markets are upheld and enforced by the state, but not controlled. Some markets may be considered as having characteristics of free markets, and others more so by regulation or intervention.
The distinction affects or describes policy and practice. Markets themselves have no inherent essential characteristic of being free versus regulated.
Most would consider the act you describe as representing intervention or regulation. Markets are not controlled by any single body, essentially by definition. Private entities and government entities participate in the market, and the state enforces the rules, and imposes regulations or interventions.
The defining feature of markets is that participants make free choices of exchange, following rules that make no explicit distinction among the various participants.
Capitalism is characterized by free markets.
Markets are the primary system of commodity exchange in capitalist society.
No market is truly free, though some policy or practices may be considered as supportive of free markets and antagonist to regulation or intervention.
Markets may occur in systems that are not capitalist.
If you want to convince me this was capitalist, you would have to convince me that the market was made freer than it was before by the act.
Capitalism is not an ideal that markets should be free, but rather the total activity occurring within capitalist society.
We are criticizing actual harm derived from current systems, not writing stories of fairy tales.
Your ideal of free markets is meaningless.
The meaningful discussion is describing how markets are occurring in practice, and their effects, in conjunction with other effects of the overall system.
Considering product was barred from market by the state, I would say this is a pretty difficult conclusion to come to.
Capitalism depends on the state to uphold it. The state affirms, defends, and protects capitalism. The state is not antagonistic to capitalism or separate from it. The state in capitalist society is part of the societal system of capitalist society.
Did you miss the part where the producers did not benefit at all?
Was the objective not to protect the prices of goods from deflation or instability?
Farmers are the producers of milk, farmers are upset by this. Farmers make less money because of this.
If prices are inflated due to induced shortage, then the effect may offset lower volume of sale, with respect to income of producers from all sales.
The people that benefit most are the Canadian Dairy Commission
I doubt it, unless you are suspecting cronyism. I am not rejecting the possibility, but I doubt you intend as much in your characterization.
How would the beneficiary be those within the Commission?
I am assuming the body is a bureaucracy in the government that employs workers to impose and to enforce regulations. Please clarify if I am mistaken in the matter.
but our current monopoly capitalist dystopia is starkly different
I want you to deeply consider the context you’re saying this because it direct exposes an abundant level of ignorance
Monopolization is a concept representing the degree of consolidation of an industry under a small number of large producers. It is a graduated characteristic of an industry. An industry many be highly monopolized even if having more than one producer. Pure monopolies are uncommon, but monopolization as a broader effect is problematic for essentially the same reasons.
The entire economy is highly consolidated under a relatively small number of massive producers. Agriculture occurs within the total system, and so the criticism would be valid even if agriculture somehow remained as a relatively competitive industry. Agriculture, however, is also highly consolidated through agribusiness. The few small farmers who remain are encumbered by the pressures of the system in which overall production is immensely consolidated, and also are dependent on agribusiness for equipment and supplies.
The number of small producers compared to large is a poor measure of consolidation versus competiveness, because each large producer carries the capacity of many small.
To me the real question is, will everyone continue simply to pretend the system is legitimate, as though sustained by magic, despite consistent and robust failures?
Perhaps under conditions resembling the theoretical perfect competition imagined by authors such as Adam Smith, your analysis might tend to be more strongly tied to practical reality, but our current monopoly capitalist dystopia is starkly different. Since supply is under consolidated control, discarding supply, through a choice of one supplier or through collusion of a few with each other or with the state, induces a scarcity that inflates prices and thereby raises profits.
Businesses have been increasingly discovered discarding product in recent years. Amazon has moved viable merchandise to landfills, because of the greater profit from setting prices high enough that the full inventory would not sell.
Also, discarding unsalable product during overproduction crises within the bust-boom cycle has been a consistent feature throughout the history of capitalism.
In the recent case you mention, of the milk dumping, households were unable to afford milk due to lost income, and so supply was wasted to protect price stability. The families still wanted the milk, and any household would have been happy to purchase at lower prices, even those able to afford the higher prices.
Even as families suffer and product is wasted, oligarchs continue consolidating wealth.
It is an incoherent objection that farmers in Canada dumping milk is somehow separate from capitalism, the system that organizes production and distribution, in Canada and everywhere else. The observation that the government is providing direction for such activities is not one that confers any value to the objection.
Any system is inefficient if it leads to overproduction.
Any system is anti-human if it supports destruction of product useful to others simply to support higher prices realized by producers.
I feel the case against capitalism is quite well corroborates by the observations referenced in your objections.
I am not explaining a risk, though, but rather behavior that has been entirely consistent from the particular participant.
There is no reason to vote down. I am trying to be helpful, by discouraging interaction with someone who repeatedly has demonstrated willful ignorance and obstructive tactics.
Anarchists seek to replace the state with systems that are constructed through full participation, not to reproduce the state with a different one that may seem to some as more appealing.
Would you mind explaining your understanding over the incompatibility between consensus and mutual aid, and what you imagine may be neither coercive or consensual?