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If capitalism was smashed

DoUsAFavour said:
Ever heard of those strange things called farmers markets that cut out transportation across continents, cuts out waste of middle men and profiteers?
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They cut out transportation? How do they do that then?

(or do you mean costs, you mean they represent a more effective use of capital)
 
DoUsAFavour said:
Ever heard of those strange things called farmers markets that cut out transportation across continents, cuts out waste of middle men and profiteers?
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Sure, but do they still function if capitalism just stopped working? Most farmers I know are miserable gits. They rather let their produce rot than give it away for some sort of revolutionary labour cheque.
 
kropotkin said:
their time will come, then those fucking 'tree surgeons' will get theirs.
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You can have a perfectly sensible conversation with a tree if you smoke enough fly agaric.

I'm sure we could reason with them.
 
blackadder said:
If what RW says is correct, then there would be enough money to share with the needy. I think it is piss poor that we have to have charities for things that the goverment should be paying for.
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I've done a very rough calculation and worked out that if everyone was on the same income all round the world everyone would get about £70/week, which if IIRC is also the current average in Brazil and Russia.

Edit: these weren't the figures I used but just to illustrate the general idea:
chart.gif
 
Bernie Gunther said:
Most farmers I know are miserable gits. They rather let their produce rot than give it away for some sort of revolutionary labour cheque.
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Possibly. But you are confusing the "traditional" image of farmers and farm workers.

The "traditional" farm run by a farmer and family with maybe one or two workers has seriously declined in the industrialised world as capitalism has squeezed into that sector.

The class of farmer (think of those checked shirts and worsted jackets in olde England) if not already broken; would be in the upheaval of society.

I'm a simple man and don't do all this hi-falutin stuff so let's talk about spuds:

After a revolution (or whatever) it would be the workers in agriculture who grow the potatoes who'd take the reins and decide where those potatoes go. To a capitalist factory that offers to pay THE FARMER in (worthless) banknotes or to a factory / catering outlet that turns them into foodstuffs that go for the benefit of society.
 
TeeJay said:
I've done a very rough calculation and worked out that if everyone was on the same income all round the world everyone would get about £70/week, which if IIRC is also the current average in Brazil and Russia.

Edit: these weren't the figures I used but just to illustrate the general idea:
chart.gif
Click to expand...
What figures did you use and why?
 
Sure Isambard, but this isn't one of those things you can leave until later. You have to sort it out right there and then, otherwise people go hungry and welcome the capitalists back in, sure as anything.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
Sure Isambard, but this isn't one of those things you can leave until later. You have to sort it out right there and then, otherwise people go hungry and welcome the capitalists back in, sure as anything.
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Again through BG, looking at it as a one off event and then having to deal with it isn't the best way to approach this. No significant shift can happen without the question being addressed, and by defintion those people involved in agricultural production will be involved. If they're not, then there's problems.

But this is where capitalism has helped us, but turning the countryside into one huge factory. Easy to run, with work broken down into simple pieces. It doesn't need a raft of engineers.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
You have to sort it out right there and then.
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Correct. It's the point of need. So those spuds will go NOW to the factory / kitchen turning out foodstuffs for the population.

For some reason the Miners Strike just popped in my head. Of course, it was important to make sure that donations went to those who needed the solidarity the most. But the best way to do that was to turn the contents of high street buckets straight into food and household stuff and toys and going straight to mining families rather than having go through the offices of the NUM leadership.
 
butchersapron said:
What figures did you use and why?
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It was a while ago and I think I used UN figures. Why did I use them? Mainly because they the first ones I found that I could use to do the calculation I wanted to do. This wasn't some PhD - it was something I did for an hour or so last year sometime.

If anyone is interested in this subject they could do worse than have a look at the 2005 UNDP report: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/
 
butchersapron said:
Again through BG, looking at it as a one off event and then having to deal with it isn't the best way to approach this. No significant shift can happen without the question being addressed, and by defintion those people involved in agricultural production will be involved. If they're not, then there's problems.

But this is where capitalism has helped us, but turning the countryside into one huge factory. Easy to run, with work broken down into simple pieces. It doesn't need a raft of engineers.
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Well yes, except that you're presumably doing this simultaneously with various environmental crises, where the only viable answer may well involve increasing the amount of human labour in food production.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
No really. I'm quite serious. I can see that capitalism needs smashing and all that stuff. But I'm one of those annoying detail oriented types.

What's the plan to make sure we can all eat just after capitalism is smashed?

Capitalism puts food in supermarkets. What do we do instead if it's smashed?
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imagine you're a serf way back when not having a good time under the economic conditions of the day, chewing the fat with the other serfs out in the field 'it's shite this feudalism' one of the more thoughtful land tillers would say 'but what do we replace it with'?

'Free labour' says the owen of his day. 'We'd be free to sell our labour to anyone who wants to buy it. The beauty is we can withold it any time we like, because we'd be free men'.

'It'll never work' chorus the other serfs 'the nobility are so strong & powerful you can't get rid of them, & the church is so strong they'll have control forever'.

'Anyway' pipes up another 'if we all had property rights who would work the land, how would we all eat'?

With that they all go back to sowing seeds, waiting for the interweb to be invented.
 
TeeJay said:
It was a while ago and I think I used UN figures. Why did I use them? Mainly because they the first ones I found that I could use to do the calculation I wanted to do. This wasn't some PhD - it was something I did for an hour or so last year sometime.

If anyone is interested in this subject they could do worse than have a look at the 2005 UNDP report: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/
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So you don't have anything at hand to back up your £70 claim?
 
Bernie Gunther said:
Well yes, except that you're presumably doing this simultaneously with various environmental crises, where the only viable answer may well involve increasing the amount of human labour in food production.
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Why presume that?
 
I think you misunderstand me montevideo, I'd *like* it to work. I just want to assure myself that the important details have been thought through properly.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
Long answer.

Tomorrow OK? I'm off to bed.
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Fair dos. And i'm not on here in the week anymore (unless i sort some stuff out) - you do when's best for you BG, and if that's not at all then fair enough :D

If there's ever a poster i wanted to have the opp to cut some slack to it's you my friend...:)
 
Bernie Gunther said:
I think you misunderstand me montevideo, I'd *like* it to work. I just want to assure myself that the important details have been thought through properly.
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surely the point is your average serf, if asked, couldn't envisage a world beyond feudalism. Especially if that world was organised around the free sale of labour - something beyond his conception. Yet something we see as a perfectly natural function of society.

And so with capitalism. How on earth do we feed ourselves without the machinery of capitalism to ensure it happens?
 
butchersapron said:
So you don't have anything at hand to back up your £70 claim?
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I could go and re-do the calculations using similar figures - for example those from recent United Nations Development Programme reports like the one I linked to above. I could cite my sources and show my working. In fact I could spent many hours doing all this and I'd probably come to a very similar figure to the £70/week one I did last time.

Can I actually prove this without doing it? Probably not.

Am I going to do it just because yet again you are being an utter fuckwit trying in about the fourth thread in a row to pick a fight with me? No, I'm not.

I could point to the graph I posted above which has an annual dollar income in PPP terms, and let people take a rough guess at where the average lies. If you guess at $6000pa this equals about £70/week.

I would however be very pleased to hear what you think the figure is, or listen to anyone else who has either worked it out or found the figure elsewhere.
 
TeeJay said:
I could go and re-do the calculations using similar figures - for example those from recent United Nations Development Programme reports like the one I linked to above. I could cite my sources and show my working. In fact I could spent many hours doing all this and I'd probably come to a very similar figure to the £70/week one I did last time.

Can I actually prove this without doing it? Probably not.

Am I going to do it just because yet again you are being an utter fuckwit trying in about the fourth thread in a row to pick a fight with me? No, I'm not.

I could point to the graph I posted above which has an annual dollar income in PPP terms, and let people take a rough guess at where the average lies. If you guess at $6000pa this equals about £70/week.

I would however be very pleased to hear what you think the figure is, or listen to anyone else who has either worked it out or found the figure elsewhere.
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Thanks for that teej Jay
 
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