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)
- 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.
