[HN Gopher] Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread'
___________________________________________________________________
Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread'
Author : awanderingmind
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-11-26 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.awanderingmind.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.awanderingmind.blog)
| smitty1e wrote:
| I submit that the chief difference between capitalism and
| Socialism/Communism is one of cardinality:
|
| Either we have a single public sector overlord, or a variety of
| private sector ones.
|
| As someone's slashdot sig held, years ago: "Under capitalism, man
| oppresses man; under Communism, it's the other way around."
| prvc wrote:
| Meanwhile, today's poor have a surplus of accessible
| carbohydrates, and this ends up being harmful to them! Such a
| thing would have been utterly beyond the imagination of the 19th
| century intellectuals whose radical views are directly taken up
| by many young people today (and many more, young and old,
| powerful and not, in some implicit or indirect form).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Oh, the irony! Right? Not really. Carbohydrates in particular
| have been sold as the top staple of a good diet
| (bread/pasta/etc. was at the top of the old food pyramid after
| all) by commercial interests for almost a century. Fats were of
| course villified for a good while. Why? Probably because it is
| easier to gorge yourself on carbo-heavy foods and drinks than
| on other types of food (also less processed foods). Thus you
| can sell more of it.
|
| (You can also salten soft drinks a bit in order to induce
| _more_ thirst... since all you have to do to hide that salty
| flavor is to add more sugar.)
|
| We live in a consumer society now, where apparent "abundance"
| gets turned into new ailments and problems in order to sell
| more stuff (not necessarily more food--could be exercise
| equipment or whatever else).
|
| And it's of course no coincidence that wealthier people have
| more and better access to whole foods and other supposed
| "lifestyle choices".
|
| There's nothing ironic here at all. Just new problems being
| invented in order to sell more stuff.
| nine_k wrote:
| Hmm. I thought that meat was always on the prized top. A
| steak, for instance, or at least some good poultry.
|
| Bread used to be very much the base, so basic that it ended
| up being mentioned in the daily prayer.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I meant top as in "eat a lot (most) of this". Meat/poultry
| was further down.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I thought we had reached a "Meat Considered Harmful" stage
| due to climate change.
|
| All the carbon management an effort to boost Beyond Burger
| sales?
|
| In any case, I'll die a carnivore.
| nine_k wrote:
| I won't say that it applies to all meat, but mostly to
| beef.
|
| Also, beef need not vanish, it could just go expensive,
| like, say, foie gras.
|
| I personally am totally fine with chicken, fish, and
| shrimp providing the bulk of animal protein in my diet,
| and relegating a steak to rare festive occasions, as it
| was historically.
| 1-more wrote:
| What sucks in reading the bread book is when you get to the bit
| where he talks about productivity. He has some great figures on
| the productive output of every industry in France, and what it
| would take for everyone in France to have enough down to the per
| capita consumption of meat, grain, etc. And he pointed to the
| industrial changes that had done so much already: surely the age
| of plenty for all and copious leisure is right around the corner,
| if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out
| like that. We still work a lot. In fact there's a loosely
| negative correlation between difficulty of a job and standard of
| living in the U.S. So every time a _futurist_ talks about how AI
| or automation or whatever is going to give everyone so much free
| time we won 't know what to do with ourselves, I can't help but
| think back to the facts and figures of this dude writing before
| we'd even harnessed electricity at scale.
| nine_k wrote:
| Have you read Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and Cognitive
| Surplus" [1]?
|
| He argues that technology does free us from more and more work,
| and we find ways to spend this time, by wasting it, or by
| fitting other things into it.
|
| E.g. the lazy Saturday when people can just do sweet nothing,
| watch TV, play games, or maybe feel bad about nothing good to
| do is a very recent development.
|
| [1]: https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931
| teg4n_ wrote:
| >copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just
| muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that.
| We still work a lot.
|
| I don't think we've ever mustered the political will to even
| give it a shot, so the fact that we work more than ever is not
| really a point against Kropotkin, IMO.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I think the issue is we are all mortals. No matter how much
| wealth we have we will all die. Sorry to crash the party. But
| wealth can prolong life and make it more enjoyable. People
| will never have enough so they will work more even when they
| don't have shortage of food.
|
| Even if you are rich and think you have more than enough, you
| SHOULD think you want to earn more just to be able to give it
| away to the less fortunate.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think you underestimate the number of people who'd accept
| a relatively comfortable life. Not everyone wants to max
| things out.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > number of people who'd accept a relatively comfortable
| life
|
| Congratulations to those who have achieved that level of
| spiritual enlightenment.
|
| Of course we "accept" what we have since it is what we
| have. What you're gonna do file a complaint?
|
| People in need think they would be more than happy to
| "accept" a "relatively comfortable life". Who wouldn't?
| The point is the word "relatively". Once they achieve
| that level then relatively happy will mean the next
| thing.
| Animats wrote:
| _" copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just
| muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that.
| We still work a lot."_
|
| This is worth thinking about. What do people actually _do_?
|
| Well, this is what.[1]
|
| - Farming is tiny. Under 1% of the labor force. In 1900, it was
| around 40%. (That's typical of most developed countries. Since
| the US is a net food exporter, that's not due to imports. Food
| preparation is 10x the size of farming. (Farmers complain that
| they capture only a small fraction of the value of food as
| eaten, but they're not doing more than a small fraction of the
| labor involved.)
|
| - US manufacturing is around 5% of the labor force. Some of
| that is due to imports.
|
| In Kropotkin's day, those two categories covered most of the
| workforce.
|
| - Health care, broadly defined, consumes a sizable fraction of
| the labor force.
|
| An interesting question to ask is how much other employment is
| not really necessary. How much is zero-sum activity?
|
| - If advertising was no longer a tax-deductible business
| expense, there would be a lot less of it.
|
| - If insurance was standardized (as it is for Medicare), the
| insurance industry could be far smaller.
|
| - If finance faced a tax on financial transactions and was
| restricted to the product set of 1980, finance would be far
| smaller.
|
| This would look a lot like China's policies today, or US
| policies of the 1950s.
|
| [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-
| gro...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Farmers complain that they capture only a small fraction of
| the value of food as eaten
|
| They're still not wrong. The difference between what they get
| paid for a potato and what I pay for a bag is quite extreme.
|
| I think it's quite a bit different than say, gasoline vs
| barrel of oil, or iPhone at Bestbuy vs what Apple gets paid,
| or lower-end clothing.
|
| I get that potato is low value/lb, but I'm thinking the same
| applies as you go up the value/lb for raw things.
| nine_k wrote:
| Production is cheap because it's massive and economies of
| scale apply, but distribution is not because it works with
| every customer inevitably. Every customer in a supermarket
| needs to interact with a cashier.
|
| Also, transporting, washing, sorting, storing are all
| scalable but not free, and these are important parts of the
| easy availability for the end customer. Then, storage is
| not preserving 100% of produce, some of it inevitably
| withers or spoils, and handling this is also not free.
|
| Potatoes are only dirt cheap if you buy them in bulk on the
| farm, then store in your basement, and sort and handle
| yourself. This is a lot of work and time spent, I've seen
| such an approach firsthand.
| Jedd wrote:
| > The difference between what they get paid for a potato
| and what I pay for a bag is quite extreme.
|
| Not only extreme, but also obscene.
|
| I recall in the late 90's someone described the poor
| profitability of potato growing in large tracts of the USA,
| and it sounded impossibly low - in the order of hundreds of
| dollars per acre.
|
| Sad but true -- while revenue per acre may be ~$2500, costs
| are ~$2000 [0]
|
| There's probably an on-topic observation to be made here
| about the past century or so spent driving subsistence
| farmers off arable land, monoculture, soil destruction,
| leading to an objectively unsustainable potato farming
| industry (in the sense of throwing more Joules into the
| working of the land, than you are getting out of it).
|
| [0] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-potatoes-profitable-
| risky...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >There appears to have been something in the air in 19th century
| Russia that lent itself to the formation of socialist and
| anarchic activity. I'm not sure what it was, but it appears to
| have subsided.
|
| That something in the air would probably have to do with a
| decrepit monarchy and deeply corrupt church working together to
| utterly screw over the people and deplete the country's wealth.
| Pre-USSR Russia is almost a poster child for the harms of the
| state.
|
| The revolutionaries that followed[0] didn't actually care about
| abolishing the state, though. They[1] were just better at keeping
| people angry at things other than themselves. After all, they had
| a benchmark to compare against - as long as they weren't any
| worse than before, they could still claim to be continuing "the
| revolution", whatever that meant.
|
| This even extended past the fall of Communism. There was a brief
| period of genuine interest in a free market, which was almost
| immediately followed by the country getting fleeced by fraudulent
| Ponzi schemes, and then a network of kleptocrats taking power.
|
| [0] Once the revolutionaries genuinely interested in progress had
| been unpersoned and replaced with authoritarians willing to
| parrot Stalinist slogans. Auth-left loves to do this to the rest
| of the left wing.
|
| [1] Or the de-Stalinized bureaucratic mess that followed.
| Jedd wrote:
| > That something in the air would probably have to do with a
| decrepit monarchy and deeply corrupt church working together to
| utterly screw over the people and deplete the country's wealth.
|
| Yes but ...
|
| That's a description of most European states since, say,
| Charlemagne defined the subsequent millennium of European
| control structures -- but pragmatically that broad description
| likely also applies to most parts of the world for most of the
| past several millennia.
|
| I suspect it's more a combination of Gutenberg tech adoption,
| and (in retrospect quite torpid) increases in education and
| state-tolerance towards humanism.
| mikl wrote:
| Considering the obesity epidemic, I think we can consider bread
| well and truly conquered.
|
| That aside, this is "Hacker News", not really the venue for
| discussion of political philosophy.
| akimball wrote:
| Hacking society has a long and rich tradition, albeit primarily
| composed of a long series of failures. A lot of us are looking
| for that one weird trick which allows one to end-run the
| various socioeconomic impediments to a forward leap in the
| realization of human potential inherent in contemporary
| regimes.
| PhileinSophia wrote:
| It's called Capitalism.
| drekk wrote:
| Obesity and malnutrition are two ends of the same coin. In
| industrial societies we subsidized calorie-dense products (in
| the US these are corn based), and mostly lead sedentary
| lifestyles even as children.
|
| Kropotkin would have a lot to say about how children of the
| lower and even middling American classes are both overweight &
| malnourished at the same time. That's without even getting to
| the fact that 20% of children are "food insecure" in the
| wealthiest capitalist liberal democracy on the planet.
|
| I hack because some rules were made to be broken. The rule that
| some children get to eat while others don't is barbarism. I
| never knew about "school lunch debt" until I immigrated to the
| US. How could I not hack in a society where many dogs lead
| better lives than the children (domestic & abroad)?
| dang wrote:
| You may have an overly narrow idea of what HN is for. As you'll
| see if you check
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, the site is
| for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. Kropotkin
| was a fascinating figure and certainly counts.
| nimbius wrote:
| Available free on project Gutenberg
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-26 23:00 UTC)