From Philosophical Research
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[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Returning land doesn't work
Core characteristics
- alias (en)
- Returning farms to Black South Africans Will Never Work
- Returning farms to Black South Africans brings famine and ineptitude
- "Nearly every single expropriated farm failed" [1]
- prototype notes
- a new one on me! reactionary tries to claim that there is an equation for what race of people should own farms. the most negative true thing you could say about returning land is that empire is arbitrary and reparations are arbitrary so it won't change much, but they specifically go for the angle that this will make the world worse because being Black is as destructive as being Stalin. (which, if true, would mean that Black South Africans are rebuilding their country and making it stable.) honestly goes to show that when people said Communism "will never work" it isn't unreasonable to think they did mean to imply that Russians or Chinese people controlling industry in their own region instead of people from other countries — I hate the word greed, but — greedily slurping up everything anyone has created will never work. how much of economics is just a bunch of made-up bullshit to justify chunk competition after it's already been happening, when underneath people believe in maximal chunk competition and want an excuse to continue it?
Wavebuilder combinations
Prototype notes (2)
- found a presenter claiming this again. not sure whether it was the original example, but it's exactly the same claim so it works.
- the claim is essentially that by the time farms were reclaimed there was no farm.
- assuming this was true, this could have happened for several reasons. maybe there was a conflict on the farm Pern style and the tenant farmers stopped working until the land was transferred. maybe the White owners were careless with the farm, and only agreed to give it back at the point it had failed and it wasn't of any use to them. there are a lot of epistemically possible reasons based on only this statement.
- according to the BBC there have been around 20 expropriations and 80,000 unsettled claims. [2] makes the claim that "every farm" in South Africa failed ridiculous due to sample size
- "White people didn't take the land" - you can claim that, but it has no bearing on the most relevant questions. if nobody in California stole houses from homeless people it doesn't make the problem of homeless people go away.
- "White people took uninhabited areas" - that one is at least concrete. but it won't win you any points with any modern-day theorists of empire. the orthodox framing within modern postcolonial theories is that pre-emptively placing people on land before nearby people can get it is Bad in and of itself. I have some issues with these theories because I don't really see how they could be applied to prevent global empire from happening; an imperialist isn't going to look at these theories, see the definition of "settler-colonialism", and spontaneously go, oh so that's actually bad? I guess I won't do it now. you have to actually justify to them why land inherently belongs to anyone instead of anyone else, which is a really sticky question. it may seem obvious that there must be something wrong with a European empire suddenly slurping up all the unused land in Africa. but... what is the actual reason for that? I'd argue it's very hard to answer if you don't subscribe to Marxism or meta-Marxism. in meta-Marxism there's an actual answer: all land in radius of a given population is part of the process of determining populational borders within which laws and morality can be applied, so if the Dutch swoop in and slurp up all the land they are reducing the barrier between the two populations to zero and negative and getting into populational conflict. if you believe in historical materialism then you realize that's historical stagnation and all things which are progress create less of that, in association with the fact that as past history has gone on there have been fewer wars. no morality required. but Tories and right-Liberals aren't going to think like that. they just believe anyone who currently owns stuff has the right to chunk-compete over the top of anybody else. ironically quite inimical to the right-Liberal concept of non-aggression pacts.
- how many years has each farm actually had to turn itself around? what is a normal setup time? the total time South Africa has been transferring land is no more than 30 years, and these 20 or so claims that have happened probably didn't all happen at once, meaning some of them had less time than that. it seems like it would be so easy for this person to look at a farm that had only been going for 2 years and say it failed because it wasn't moving fast enough for him.
- "they sold the farm" - this is the only believable accusation. there are many times when a government program backfires because it doesn't understand how bad things are and subsequently things like fishing permits or food stamps get sold. I really doubt the presenter understands why this happens or how to prevent it.
- the presenter is so convinced that this is facts just because he had a big long paper of apparently true anecdotes. but we need to stop and look at the real elephant in the room. even if 20 farms utterly failed, and we assume that is a true event, only people who believe in historical materialism can actually jump to the conclusion that this is a reliable pattern. if you believe it's not possible to predict history then you literally can't know that the next expropriated farm is going to fail. this is the deepest irony within anticommunism — only if you believe history contains predictable patterns can you even say that "Communism doesn't work", at which point you've already accepted a portion of Communism. if you make this argument about transferring farms, the whole point of it is to argue that there are actual causes for why this happens and the causes are repeatable causes. but what even are the stated causes here? even if you answer "racism", that isn't logically coherent, because a concept of racism doesn't actually explain how the farms fail.
- this presenter misleadingly brings up "compensation" when he doesn't even care whether farmers are compensated, he just doesn't want the farms transferred for any price.
- the only two ideologies are small government and big government. as if there are not multiple methods for each of those? "it's about advancing a political agenda!" for the only other ideology called Big Government.
- oh he shockingly provided an answer. tribes in Southern Africa didn't farm, therefore they still won't. well, that's logically flawed but at least it's something.
- "why not invest into those areas and build infrastructure" - he literally doesn't understand that this is a full eminent domain program and it can be used to build public roads etc, so he's griping that it doesn't do the thing it does. the reason it hasn't built public facilities is literally that it hasn't been going fast enough because the land holders have been resisting it
- the government spent money to train the farmers but it didn't work!
- two groups of people being created equal "has no basis in reality"
- trying to make two people-groups equal is Marxism. so, there is Marxism in the United States declaration of independence. all men are created equal. Protestants and Irish people living in harmony is Marxism, apparently.
- this is such a disgusting definition of "free enterprise", it's like, Chunk Enterprise, the system where White people have the right to chunk-compete over other populations and stopping White people from committing imperialism or trying to build a parliament over them is unacceptable Big Government. I think about that pamphlet that inadvertently claimed Latin America didn't need democracy and the way democracy works is you persuade the upper-rank people to campaign and vote as their way of controlling people instead of other ways. the center-Liberals were sounding like Lenin. is this to say that Toryism is actually a kind of chunk anarchy where small expanding chunks of people want Freedom from the realities of chunk competition and inevitable State regulation of resulting death and violence? no Big Government no I wanted to kill people you bastards
- it's telling that when you watch a South African news outlet, from their point of view the government has hardly done anything and hasn't gone fast enough to have meaningfully transferred land to Black South Africans. the government can't exactly wreck South Africa if it hasn't even changed anything. [3]
- 100,000 out of a million, this one says.
- looks confusing as to whether people have been trained for farming or not. could be different in different areas of the country.
