Ontology:Q2488

2488. [F2] (pronounced [F2]) Returning land doesn't work

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label (en)

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Returning land doesn't work

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" [3]

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statement with no possible backing claims 1:(-)1:(-)1

prototype notes

... 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. ... 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?

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[P] (pronounced [P]) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder): forms result [Item]

Q2489 The concept of "scarcity" is prejudiced

along with [Item]

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Returning land doesn't work

forming from [Item]

[F2] (pronounced [F2]) Returning land doesn't work

A republic exists to prevent people from killing each other

Q2489 The concept of "scarcity" is prejudiced

Usage notes

This claim recently surfaced in the United States thanks to the actions of the Tea Party / MAGA axis, although it does not appear to be new in South Africa. For the past 30 years, the South African government had been attempting to have a program to transfer land from White South Africans to Black South Africans, generally with compensation. According to Black South Africans, the program had been going slowly, to the point that some people were beginning to suspect that the government trusted other members of the government with the deeds more than they trusted the people. Figures given about the transfers of land vary, from 20 claims out of 80,000 claims settled to 100,000 deeds transferred out of a million deeds. These may refer to different kinds of claims, such as claims "without compensation" versus claims where compensation is legally required — as is normal in South Africa. In any case, it is evident the number of farms which have been transferred to Black South Africans in the past 30 years is a small percentage of the number of farms which had been designated for the program. In light of this, some White people in the United States got very upset at the prospect of the program actually being finished, and proceeded to come up with reasons that the program was supposedly "a disaster" which would in some way destroy South Africa.

One of the least unconvincing arguments for this claim is the argument that after farms were transferred the people did not know how to use them and after their time on the farm essentially left no farm. There are varying reports about whether the government attempted to train people to run farms. Black South Africans seem to be reporting that such training was next to nonexistent. Even so, you may see claims that the government "wasted money" on attempting to train Black South Africans. The key concern people in the United States have is clearly not what actually happened, but whether putting in such spending on training or buying farms would hypothetically be a good idea.

One immediate question to ask about this argument is what the normal turnaround time for starting a farm from scratch in South Africa should be. The program has been going for no more than 30 years. All the claims have been going through slowly. How many years would each of the farmers have been left with to get to know their farm? Ten? Five? Two? What is reasonable to expect from the first two years someone has ever farmed? It is worth remembering that capitalists that spontaneously go into agriculture sometimes fail. J.D. Vance infamously started a giant tomato greenhouse that failed with many of the tomatoes damaged at harvest time. Even when you make things seemingly easy, it is not a trivial thing to teach people to farm. This makes the claim that "transferring land doesn't work" dubious on the grounds that it does not provide a realistic way to distinguish a good result from a bad result in the time which has actually passed.

A second argument you may see is that White people "didn't take the farms" because they supposedly only chose uninhabited areas. This claim is complicated to evaluate under standard Liberal-republican philosophies, which are generally not equipped to answer questions about how two separate populations should interact or which people-group should rightfully control a plot of land. If we step back and ask the question in the positive — "is it a good idea for Dutch people to descend into Africa and slurp up all the uninhabited land?" — there simply is no answer either way. Europeans doing Liberalism cannot answer questions about the future of Africans and South Africans doing Liberalism cannot answer questions about the future of Europeans. With that said, no modern theorist of empire inside Liberalism will want to share a country with you if you answer the question with a strong "yes". In lack of any strong grounding in historical materialism, United States universities have a highly moralistic view of history in which it is always assumed that the actions of a global empire or the people inside it have a moral valence. The orthodox framing of empire within modern postcolonial theories is that pre-emptively placing people on land before nearby people can get it is already bad in and of itself, and if it is followed up by the creation of a colonial government over both populations of people, every single action of individuals on that continent that led up to that structure was morally wrong. Should the Afrikaner ally believe in a worldwide God, each of those actions may as well be an action against God.

Under a historical-materialist framework, the problem of what group of people should get to live or produce somewhere becomes easier to analyze. All land in the radius of a given population contributes to the process of determining the social and political borders of populations. Borders between populations can be fuzzy or irrelevant due to great distances, but should populations expand toward each other's outer edge or over each other populational conflict will occur, and populations will increasingly begin to assert their identities, conceptions of morality, and laws. Afrikaners may begin to hold everybody in both populations to laws that their empire is required to exist. South Africans may eventually begin to assert their own separate morality that Afrikaner empire is not welcome and certain parts of it will be made illegal. Laws and moral codes are not universal, but something that emerges from localized socially-linked populations, and what they each perceive to be threats as well as their own localized strategy to survive. Thus, as long as people belong to a population, individual populations may be incapable of perceiving the possibility that what they are doing is wrong. If you believe that all history operates on particular patterns and is not specific to particular populations, then you would observe that many cases of societal progress involve transitioning to periods with fewer conflicts and wars. You flip backward in a history book and see a warring states period or a civil war; you hope there's not another one tomorrow. This kind of framework makes it relatively obvious that expanding into other populations is a bad idea, and should it happen accidentally the only good outcomes would come from both populations intentionally committing themselves to a new connecting structure. Right-Liberals and Tories can't be expected to think this way. Even given an analysis which is perfectly devoid of morality, these types of people love to believe that any particular chunk of humanity can have as much expansion as it wants without any obligation for collisions between populations to spawn government. From a Tory point of view Africa literally belongs to the most productive person who can forcefully occupy Africa, and any attack on that person's claim to be there is an offense to that "inherent" individual right. Tories do not even like to believe in logic, so to them — or even anyone socially connected to them who is too moderate to declare them not part of the same nation — no moral argument can make a bad thing actually seem bad.

In short, Tories have no sense of morality, decency, or justice. They will not necessarily change any of their behavior with evidence it is morally wrong. But if Tories or right-Liberals have any attachment to "democracy", angering postcolonial theorists to the point of them not wanting to be part of the same country is not the right choice. It would be more advantageous to maintaining the existence of a United States identity to try to at least pretend to understand what global empire is and that apartheid is not good. It begins to become clear here that a major reason for White people needlessly attacking reforms in Third World countries is an anxiety about their own White population splitting apart. At a certain point of the United States tearing into two separate populations, trying to cling to whatever White people exist in the world against all Black people becomes appealing.

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Prototype notes (2)

• 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.
• ... 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.
• "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
• 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
• so, Afrikaners used to have a tradition of "conformity" where if you weren't totally loyal to the empire for the sake of it you were the enemy. if transferring land to a group of people to connect that group of people changes nothing... why was that necessary? being a connected group of people on a particular constellation of lands clearly meant something to the Afrikaners, rather than having no impact.