My family took care of a small herd of dairy goats when I was growing up. They could definitely make their displeasure known if you tried to make them do something they didn’t want to (especially when they were very nearly your own weight). Milking time? Most days they were perfectly happy to jump up on the stand for us to relieve their udders for them, sometimes even before we’d gotten everything set up.

I am careful where I get my milk from because the big dairy institutions are rather problematic. And I agree that the broad disempowerment and incarceration inherent in farming is an issue on its own. But saying that milk is always, unequivocally, unwanted theft (and respectively that farms provide an unqualified worse life) is just the other side of the same human-exceptionalism coin – you’re removing their agency to say “yes”.

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The no-censorship crowd is funny. “I wanted to block everyone whose admins block someone, in order to find the people whose admins don’t block anyone, so I could talk to the few people I hadn’t blocked because they don’t block people.”

(And that’s ignoring the traditional entitlement in that people somewhere else deciding not to listen to you somehow means you’re censored locally.)

Hypocracy – and conspiracy-level rambling – aside, there’s actually an interesting kernel of commentary here on how we talk about joining and administering Fedi. On the one hand, we say that newcomers shouldn’t worry about which instance to start out on, because every one connects to every other, but on the other we celebrate how the instanced architecture allows admins control over which other instances to connect to. And then you have the deeper issue of the vast majority of the software assuming DNS, so even if admins do want to connect to Tor instances, they can’t feasably do so without a fair bit of host-system tweaking. Yeah, those mixed messages are just the emergent result of which layer of abstraction we’re talking about in any given conversation, but it would be nice if we could find language that doesn’t take literally the opposite tack on each successive layer.

And that’s just the raw money spent. I can’t imagine China is using that investment less efficiently than the US. As the article says:

When you further consider that a significant portion of U.S. research, up until this point, has been invested in projects designed to produce academic publications and not technological advances, the picture is even more bleak.

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I’d say there’s a bit of a difference in that a shopkeeper’s goods don’t depend on any particular storefront (or even any storefront at all with the internet – or a traveller’s cart/van), while a farmer’s land is a crucial part of the means of the crops’ production. I’m also not saying that simply renting is sufficient to be working class, just that it removes one measure by which someone could be pushed out of it.

I also wonder if we’re talking past each other due to misaligned definitions. On one end of the spectrum you have large-scale agricultural business owners who spend their days in the office managing the people who do the actual labour; they’re definitely bourgeois. On the other you have the farmhands themselves who do largely fall into the proletariat. The people I’m talking about are the small farmers in between, who don’t have a boss per se but also don’t employ anyone in turn (at most they enlist a grown child or a long-time friend for a day or two’s parnership to rush the harvest in when weather begins building on the horizon); who only have the one or two fields stretching out behind their own house and who aren’t in any position to consider expanding.

And given the widespread political illiteracy driven by teamerism I don’t think we can rely on what any person or group of people supports to reflect their actual class interests. How much of the reactionary, anti-worker support is because of identifying with the party, as opposed to identifying with the party because of those beliefs? (Also, anti-tax and anti-regulation positions aren’t uniquely bourgeoise ones, they can also be libertarian/anarchist and intended, even if wrongly, as part of a larger system that is just as focused on empowering the working class.)

Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll definitely check it out. It does indeed sound like something paralleling my position here. The feudal->capitalist economic distinction has always been a weak point in my understanding, and it’ll be interesting to see how Varoufakis characterizes them both.

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Yeah, there’s certainly a fair petite bourgeois population among farmers, but I think you overestimate its size. Many farmers might own the land… if it weren’t still under morgage to the bank. The tractor is almost certainly also still on loan from the dealership since the same “trade in for new, better equipment” scam is as prevalent there as it is for personal vehicles. The corn and especially soybeans aren’t something that can be sold directly at scale (farmers’ markets can only support so much) unlike dairy which you can theoretically turn to regional groceries for – you’re selling to one of a small number of processors and aggregators, and if they decide they don’t need as much as you sold them last year you’re left scrabbling for something to do with a lot of worthless product. At the end of the year, most of the profit has gone right back to the financiers rather than to the farmer themself.

The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it’s advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.

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