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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
@ jonathan - thanks a lot for the well-thought answer; i've read the article you posted, and while i consider the paleolithic a sort of golden age of humankind, i doubt it was a paradise-- neanderthals got a raw deal out of that era, for example.
i do appreciate that economic activity is culturally relative, yes, but ultimately everyone has to deal with the problem of how to provide for the group/tribe/family/self. when food is abundant, everyone is friends, when there isn't enough to go around, cannibalism just might ensue.
solutions to the problem of providing for life vary a lot-- amazon tribes untouched by western civilization go from sharing everything with everyone to killing people for trespassing one's plot. from the look of it it would seem that private property begins with agriculture (in other places, it's herding that does it-- there is no cattle in the amazon though).
anyway, speaking of property, i purposefully did not mention beachfront property-- i said beachfront housing if i recall. it was my intention to bring up something that is of limited availability but of widespread desirability. if everyone who wanted to stay at the beach could simply show up, we'd have some sort of refugee camps in all coastal areas, and it would probably cease to be desirable, or violence would erupt.
it could be anything else-- say, cars? everyone could get a car in the old east germany, but it would take years and years on a waitlist.
i understand that part of the refutation of capitalism has to do with debunking the notion of scarcity, which the article linked claimed it's inexistent among the !kung, and porky claims would not exist under communism. but scarcity can be very real even in non-human systems-- biological ecosystems go through boom and bust cycles-- humans didn't invent famines, plagues, and natural disasters. we can't just wish that shit away.
even in the case of the noble peasant you propose-- plagues, droughts, floods, frosts, hail and other natural phenomena can kill a local agriculture very fast. trade, which allows goods to move quickly, keep people alive even when crops fail. an economy such as you propose would necessitate trade, and even if it was banned sure a black market would appear somehow. with trade you'd get division of labor-- suddenly i can get a more secure and varied food supply by making pottery than by being a peasant, trading with multiple peasants instead of eating just the local crops. maybe i work in a clay quarry that supplies potters so i can work all year without worrying about local crop failures. and everything begins again, including money when barter doesn't cut it.
we can't really put the cat back in the bag and abolish global trade. i'm looking for viable future models rather than past utopias. when hippie communes sprouted in the 60s, they sought a return to nature, to living off the land, to self-sufficiency, but that life is hard and suddenly walking to the store and buying a twinky seems more desirable than waiting 8 months for your crops to be ready for the harvest (and fingers crossed, and damn those insects).
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For the most part I agree with this and I think your criticisms are mostly on-point.
I have to admit, I think you've misunderstood where I am coming from exactly, but I think that's because I could be more clear in how I worded things in the last post. One thing that I need to be clear on is that I don't ACTUALLY think that my vision of the "noble peasant" will ever come to be realized in my life time or even ever. Nor do I think that the communes of the 60s and this whole self-sufficeincy idea is where I'm coming from either. I don't necessarily not believe in a division of labor, although I think that specialization is a plague on every individual. In my initial post, I simply proposed an idea of what society OUGHT to look like, because I thought you were looking for alternative systems of thought. So, yes, all of the issues you have raised are of prime importance and aren't to be addressed as failings of capitalism, but rather things we ought to keep, while fixing its internal contradictions (the "metabolic rift" being a major one).
As such, in practice, my perspective is similar to that of Glice's.
To use your terminology, I think the ship that has sailed is the idea of a radical break with Capitalism. Like I said, Marx is a critical tool (my ideal state being a means by which I can critique).
As far as price controls causing famines, I've never read anything to support that. Most of the time, when price controls are lifted, people protest. Take the recent protests in Nigeria for example.
I would also argue that unemployment is only a problem because capitalism has shut people off from utilizing their own labor to provide for themselves. In order to do that, you need a loan or capital (for a farm or a business) and most people can't get either.
But I can't adequately criticize unless I've read the book you're talking about. What book is it?