tanadrin

if you do not actually think your political principles can ever be translated into action, you need better political principles!

this is why cyncial doomerism is fundamentally reactionary. turns all these self-proclaimed "leftists" into spineless parochial whiners

ah yes, sighing that the outcomes you want will never happen because they are too hard, i recall that was lenin's strategy exactly

Which is not leftism worthy of the name.

All this amounts to is a sort of feckless “nothing can ever change so why try, let’s defend the status quo even as it drives the country into fascism”

The whole point of oversight is that it doesn’t rely on the goodwill of the thing you are regulating. This is why the government has, if it really needs them, guys with guns.

The kind of shit the USSR was only ever able to dream about, basically.

You’d have various flavors of agricultural technician employed by the US government, and it would be considered a white collar job for agronomy nerds.

Kansas and Iowa should be fiefdoms of Monsanto, which should be wholly owned by the US government. “Farmer” would no longer exist as a job if I got my way.

The whole reason farmers are a politically influential constituency is because of the cultural image the “family farm” conjures up. Destroy it, and then you can regulate evil Big Ag until the cows come home and nobody will give a shit

Farmers, used car dealer, supplement wholesalers, and everybody else who forms the core constituency of Trumpism ought to be ruined by whatever regulatory force the state can unleash on them, and mutatis mutandis the same in other developed countries

Yeah, again: if you elect fascists you’re always gonna have a bad time. There is no rural political economy that will save you from that. I am proposing my specific policies specifically because I want to break the power of the pro-fascist coalition forever

And again, primary food production is a tiny portion of the economy of developed countries. Even a private food monopoly is one you can bully with a regulatory agency if you’re not a coward. It’s not some inherently unstoppable political force.

Not just communism either—David Graeber was in favor of central planning and he was an anarchist.

If you turn every sector into a state owned monopoly this is called “central planning” and it is a famous pillar of many leftist ideologies.

I don’t think you know what a liberal is and I’m not sure you know what a leftist is either if you think it is the effects of *monopolies* that leftists should be worried about and that liberals support.

Liberals hate monopolies! They like free trade! That is in fact the origin story of every major liberal movement in the 19th century. You know “liberal” has a meaning beyond vibes, right?

Are we capitalists now who are precious about the supposed efficiency of the free market? What you nationalize the monopoly it becomes your Ministry of Food Production and you can make it do whatever you want.

This is true in Europe too, by and large. City dwellers and suburbanites need to stop acting like reactionary rural freaks have legitimate grievances! They mostly don’t. They mostly are racist and hate the economically more dynamic regions on which they depend.

A lot of people in rural areas are just fundamentally ideological enemies and should be treated as such when it comes to politics. Same as right wing evangelicals or Qanon types. You’re not gonna get them on your side and it’s a waste of time to try.

But labor policy will continue to be terrible while reactionaries control the government—and there is no amount of pro-rural policy on the part of the center left or left that will get rural voters on their side. So there’s no sense is defending the reactionary pro-rural ideology

In terms of economic clout the whole farming sector tiny—it’s not that agribusiness is too wealthy and powerful to regulate, certainly not compared to any other sector of the economy.

In contrast mega corporations are a popular punching bag, and I think the left should use that to destroy reactionary rural capitalists and replace them with a much less sympathetic constituency it will be politically easy to regulate

Yeah I mean any conservative political regime will be a nightmare for labor regardless of who is employing that labor. But as a matter of political reality, the death grip on the American psyche held by “family farms” makes them politically far more influential than they otherwise would be

i am not the one defending the existence of a reactionary class of rural landowners! i am *opposed* to the existence of kulaks

i'm sorry, is my program of "collectivize and nationalize all agriculture so it can be managed directly by the state" somehow not socialist enough for you??

this is flatly false. around 95% of farms in the US are classified as family farms. farmers are a politically powerful constituency because of american nostalgia for the rural past, not because they have some outsized control of government revenue

let giant agribusiness devour them all, then regulate it to within an inch of its life, or else nationalize it if you wanna go full Attlee. seems like an obvious moral, political, and practical win!

in the US specifically the Good Farmer is a reactionary settler-colonialist myth used to prop up everything from genocide of native americans to slavery to lack of labor regulations with teeth in the modern day. i am baffled by left and center-left people who try to defend that idea.

the yeoman smallholder has to be frank been the enemy of both liberalism and leftism since the french revolution. i don't know why people are suddenly acting like rural capital holders are somebody that we ought to be concerned about protecting as an economic class