[p2p-research] debate on open agriculture

[Patrick Anderson]

Jul-16-2009: Posted to P2Presearch at ListCultures.org

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> agricultural production not a very safe business

This sentence contains the ever prevalent broken-mindset assumption
that production must be for profit instead of for product.

The fundamental reason we are failing as a species is because we work
*against* each other when we attempt to keep price above cost and the
Means of Production out of the hands of those who actually need the
products thereof.

Production should not be about "exchange value", it should be about "use value".

But only consumers care about "use value", and they have not yet
become aware enough to realize they must organize and OWN the Means of
Production for themselves, even when they do not happen to have the
skills needed to operate them, so they can receive the product "at
cost" while also being in full control of how that production is
achieved.

Profit is not a measure of success, it is a measure of failure!

Profit increases as a consumer becomes more dependent upon the current
owners of the Means of Production.

We must stop playing this hideous and immoral game of keeping price
above cost, for it causes those who are rewarded to make choices that
further increase scarcity - including biodiversity destruction through
the elimination of entire species.

In the future a few of us will organize (obviously the
profiteer-controlled and therefore scarcity-seeking governments will
never help us) in a GNU way that treats profit as an investment from
each payer - causing ownership and therefore control to be
continuously distributed (actually just not centralized) into the
hands of those who really need it, and the only ones that deserve it,
and the only ones for which production should ever occur.