The big city, the biggest error since time memorial????

[normtransformer]

Lets think for a moment logical. The 2 most common interests of nearly all(excemptions are existing always) humans on this earth are:
1.Peace........without this valuesystem and hirarchy structure in which we live, nobody and really nobody could be really interested to make war or to get attacked. its stressy to live in fear or paranoia that somebody could hurt somebody you love.

2.Social life.......Or you live alone or with other human beings.in the moment when a human meets another human there starts automatically a social exchange - not important now good or bad. in this moment we learn from each other how to treat each other and let s be honest if we know somebody well and we really want it we find a way to live in peace.So the main factor is to KNOW each other as much as possible, to be as much as possible social and to guarantee peace by understanding each others problems, strength and weakness.

They, in a democratic school,taught me that life without hierarchy, money, religion is possible, there were tests and experiments. There is the proof that a community between 60-100 persons is able to work in the same way like cities or villages nowadays. So the main difference between a 100 person village and a 100 person anarchist community is that in the first one people live by obeying laws social(and we see it doesn t work well) and in the second one people live in a kind of improvised self-created social-exchange-structure by compensating the earth-given instability of strength and lets call it knowledge or "intelligence" (or the fact that not everybody thinks the same fast, clever, open-minded and so on-biological mutation). In the first villages you have not to be social even, you have only to respect the laws even if you don t like them. In the second village you are confronted with a daily challenge to understand your inhabitants well and take so much freedom that you dont restrict the freedom of anybody else. so sounds like: if you want to use your brain you could live in an anarchist community, if you feel more confident to be to lazy to think, than shut up, obey, ora et labora. However.
Nowadays we live in big cities, full of gray, no nature, stinky cars around, stressful life style(we have to work 30 years because we want a house even if it takes only 3 month to build a house???), and in apartments side by side with people which we dont know. But the less we know a person, the less social we can be as i explained before and if you agree. So especially in our nowadays "high-developed" civilization it happens that our neighbor which we dont see because of an only 30cm thick wall could die without noticing it.
Is the city the "devil" of our unsatisfied lifestyles where sociality has no space but not, that we dont want it but the fact that with a certain quantity of people, knowing each other, becomes impossible and to act social only a painful cramp???:cool:

[WeAreReborn]

Lets think for a moment logical. The 2 most common interests of nearly all(excemptions are existing always) humans on this earth are:
1.Peace........without this valuesystem and hirarchy structure in which we live, nobody and really nobody could be really interested to make war or to get attacked. its stressy to live in fear or paranoia that somebody could hurt somebody you love.

2.Social life.......Or you live alone or with other human beings.in the moment when a human meets another human there starts automatically a social exchange - not important now good or bad. in this moment we learn from each other how to treat each other and let s be honest if we know somebody well and we really want it we find a way to live in peace.So the main factor is to KNOW each other as much as possible, to be as much as possible social and to guarantee peace by understanding each others problems, strength and weakness.

They, in a democratic school,taught me that life without hierarchy, money, religion is possible, there were tests and experiments. There is the proof that a community between 60-100 persons is able to work in the same way like cities or villages nowadays. So the main difference between a 100 person village and a 100 person anarchist community is that in the first one people live by obeying laws social(and we see it doesn t work well) and in the second one people live in a kind of improvised self-created social-exchange-structure by compensating the earth-given instability of strength and lets call it knowledge or "intelligence" (or the fact that not everybody thinks the same fast, clever, open-minded and so on-biological mutation). In the first villages you have not to be social even, you have only to respect the laws even if you don t like them. In the second village you are confronted with a daily challenge to understand your inhabitants well and take so much freedom that you dont restrict the freedom of anybody else. so sounds like: if you want to use your brain you could live in an anarchist community, if you feel more confident to be to lazy to think, than shut up, obey, ora et labora. However.
Nowadays we live in big cities, full of gray, no nature, stinky cars around, stressful life style(we have to work 30 years because we want a house even if it takes only 3 month to build a house???), and in apartments side by side with people which we dont know. But the less we know a person, the less social we can be as i explained before and if you agree. So especially in our nowadays "high-developed" civilization it happens that our neighbor which we dont see because of an only 30cm thick wall could die without noticing it.
Is the city the "devil" of our unsatisfied lifestyles where sociality has no space but not, that we dont want it but the fact that with a certain quantity of people, knowing each other, becomes impossible and to act social only a painful cramp???:cool:
I don't think it is essentially the "devil", it is just the conditions in which it was spawned into existence. That being Capitalism. A city can be intimate, though you wouldn't know everyone, you could know all your neighbors and a few others quite well. I think cities are needed with such a large population. Though I must agree with your analysis of the lack of meaning in relationships. It is a shame really how far Capitalism shows its ugly face. But the point is cities aren't the problem society is. Even in small towns people can feel isolated and lonely.

[Comrade Wolfie's Very Nearly Banned Adventures]

I think your missing the problem with Alienation, which is a by-product of capitalism, cities themselves arn't inherently oppressive, isolating or alienating, it is due to the social relations that arise out of capitalism, only primmies would consider cities themselves to be truely 'evil'.

Also cities were vital to human development, division of labour etc.

[Sosa]

I love big cities! (no, I'm not being sarcastic)

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Cities are a great idea ruined by horrible implementation.


Nowadays we live in big cities, full of gray,

There's no reason cities can't be colourful and beautiful.


no nature,

This can easily be solved with parks, urban farms and gardens and other green spaces. And more trees. Trees are good.


stinky cars around,

Cities have existed long before the car, and my hope is that they will long outlive it.


stressful life style(we have to work 30 years because we want a house even if it takes only 3 month to build a house???), and in apartments side by side with people which we dont know.

That's capitalism, not cities, that is at fault here. Money and the utter mismanagement of land result in sprawling developments that don't encourage neighbourliness and which nobody can really afford.


But the less we know a person, the less social we can be as i explained before and if you agree. So especially in our nowadays "high-developed" civilization it happens that our neighbor which we dont see because of an only 30cm thick wall could die without noticing it.
Is the city the "devil" of our unsatisfied lifestyles where sociality has no space but not, that we dont want it but the fact that with a certain quantity of people, knowing each other, becomes impossible and to act social only a painful cramp???:cool:

I think the problem with cities as they currently stand is that they are not holisticly designed with the well-being of their inhabitants in mind - in fact they are hardly designed at all, instead growing in an ad hoc fashion according to the whims of rich developers. I believe it would be entirely possible to encourage neighbourliness through clever design if for whatever reason a massive change in social relations doesn't go all the way.

[bailey_187]

I couldnt think of anything worse than living in a community of 60-100 like you talk about in ur post.

[bailey_187]

When i see threads like this and environemental ones i really worry about what some people see Communism as

[ckaihatsu]

I don't think it is essentially the "devil", it is just the conditions in which it was spawned into existence. That being Capitalism. A city can be intimate, though you wouldn't know everyone, you could know all your neighbors and a few others quite well. I think cities are needed with such a large population. Though I must agree with your analysis of the lack of meaning in relationships. It is a shame really how far Capitalism shows its ugly face. But the point is cities aren't the problem society is. Even in small towns people can feel isolated and lonely.


Cities were much worse during the early days of the Industrial Revolution (or right now in sweatshop China, etc.). The flipside to the endless traffic, buildings, structure, and piling-on of bodies in city life is the increased options for lifestyles, cosmopolitanism, amenities, basis for higher culture, and other things.

I'd argue, too, though, that the advent of the net has leveled the geographical field to a large extent -- even in *person* it wouldn't be (wasn't) nearly as easy to find conversations on *exactly* what one might want to discuss....

The smaller-scale down you go, though, I'd say, the more the geography doesn't matter -- if one is really looking for some very intimate, one-on-one kind of relationship one can find that anywhere there are people....

[Ovi]

I think your missing the problem with Alienation, which is a by-product of capitalism, cities themselves arn't inherently oppressive, isolating or alienating, it is due to the social relations that arise out of capitalism, only primmies would consider cities themselves to be truely 'evil'.

Modern cities are the product of capitalism. While talking about how socialism would look like is on the verge of utopianism, without private land (thus no highly priced land), no market (thus no pressure towards large producers; no race to the bottom that creates a large physical separation between workplaces that now pollute and living space), no inefficiencies such as the need for multiple shops when one would do, just to prevent private monopolies and with people deciding what they want instead of minorities following profit motives or bureaucratic plans, buildings with tens of stores, day to day dependency on cars, separation between countryside and cities might not have existed. Cities themselves might not have even existed today, depending on how city would be defined.

[normtransformer]

Well i see that most comments are talking about to modify the current cities, as i intended to do. People who are walking with a stalinist flag i understand that we would never find a compromise as i know that stalinists are not refusing hierarchy;-). I was more concentrated in the question how much people can live together in a community or lets say cities (i never said that we must live in a community of 60-100 people) without a law and still the people know each so well that everybody reacts to everybody in a proper way what means to know the strength and weakness of each person and in case to be able to compensate this instability. Lets imagine: I am stronger than you and i know you have problems with your back and i see you carrying a 30 kg bag. If i know about your hurting back, i could intervene and say: give me the bag, i carry it. In a big city lets talk about a metropol like paris with 12 mio inhabitants, we will never be able to compensate this instability of strength. This constant try to be social is for me the base for a life in peace and freedom.
Beside this i am sure that the main interest of an anarchist is to divide power as much as possible and in this moment we have to consider that the bigger the city is, the more power i give to it. Where is the power? Where are the best schools, where is the best medical support, where is the heart of the power- in the heart of every city, in the parlament where they decide laws and orders. Where is the highest pollution and where is the power able to control us best? This centralization of everything is the base for the power in the moment, the more people i put together, the easier i control them. We can turn it how we want i dont find in the concentration of so much people the good things. A big city has for sure his fascinating sights but i prefer a life closer to the nature than more colors on the city buildings.
As anarchist i am interested to divide power as much as possible thats the reason why i started to think to make cities as small as possible. How big is my question. When i wrote in my thread about 60-100 people, i was talkin about an experiment in the past, a proof that a life without an hierarchical structure is possible. In fact i believe too that we can increase this quantity of people. I believe that if these 100 people giving their kind of lifestyle from generation to generation we can arrive till 1000 or 5000 or more. i am not a prophet but i can speculate in a realistic way. So 5000 people communities is already a small city with the advantage that i am still able to know more or less all inhabitants to be able to understand each ones weakness and strength.
And we should not forget that main problems of a city are not the colors, the problem are the bad air, the anonymous life and mass production. We are far away from nature, we dont know what we eat and the most even dont know how to plant things, people are eating meat and are not able to kill an animal. Massproduction is programmated and we even dont know if the water we drink at home is healthy. lets be honest we know a fuck what is going around us. we dont know how much industries are polluting our earth and how much poison they throw in our rivers and maybe this is responsible for cancer like it happened here in italy where they put 600000l old oil in the river po last year and the fish are changing their sex. and the power has only one possibility: to hide all this bullshit, otherwise we would start a revolution. I think to go back to nature, to find the right human-nature-symbiose, is essential in our lives. I was not talking about to become primitivists, to refuse any technology, no the contrary, to use all possible technology which guarantees that neither the humans or the nature suffer because of its use or existence.

Sorry for my bad english, am from bosnia, hope you undrstand more or less....anarchist greetings.

[Taikand]

As NoXion "the science god" said , it's all about cities' design, or lack of.Many persons living together in a certain space?I see no problem with that, yet the problem rises from the way cities are built. Each and every economic decision-maker chooses to build according to his narrow vision of the city.In order for anything, not only cities, to be efficient it needs to be designed coherently, so that all elements fit together perfectly.When someone makes the cars, someone else makes the roads, and another guy tat has no relation to these two builds wherever his short-term profit drive points to we have these chaotic urban arrangements. Many things are not taken into the grand equation because there's no such grand equation. It's like telling ten people to make , each one of them, a tenth of a ...let's say computer, without these persons communicating with each other, it is very likely that the components will not be compatible.

Off-topic: That text seems cluttered, do you think arranging it into separated paragraphs will help?

[ckaihatsu]

Where is the power? Where are the best schools, where is the best medical support, where is the heart of the power- in the heart of every city, in the parlament where they decide laws and orders. Where is the highest pollution and where is the power able to control us best? This centralization of everything is the base for the power in the moment, the more people i put together, the easier i control them.




And we should not forget that main problems of a city are not the colors, the problem are the bad air, the anonymous life and mass production.




lets be honest we know a fuck what is going around us.


These are all relatively valid criticisms, but at the same time I hope you're not simply being pessimistic, either -- oftentimes descriptions that are true at general scales, like yours, may not apply *uniformly* to all of the people within -- there will be wide variations at the small-scale, or individual, level.

So *politically* you're correct, of course, but these problems are not *monolithic* against everyone -- there are ways that people get smart and even live somewhat self-determined, decent lives for themselves even if they haven't been to name-brand schools. Or they may receive appropriate medical care that restores them to health even if it's not from the newest well-known hospital.

Furthermore, things like consumption (of mass-produced goods and services), socializing, and political involvement are *much* more of an individual thing -- they *will* be limited by one's having to work for a living, true, but given some free time people have always found ready ways to do them, if under less-than-desired circumstances.

[The Douche]

I think your missing the problem with Alienation, which is a by-product of capitalism, cities themselves arn't inherently oppressive, isolating or alienating, it is due to the social relations that arise out of capitalism, only primmies would consider cities themselves to be truely 'evil'.

Also cities were vital to human development, division of labour etc.

Lots of people would argue that cities are inherently oppresive, because the city does not/cannot create what it needs to sustain itself, so it has to depend on the rural world. Extrapalate this to a larger level, and you have the priniciple of imperialism, the developed world exploiting the third world, something I assume you agree with.

Are you in favor of division of labor?

[Revolution starts with U]

Evolution takes 100s of thousands of years under natural circumstances. Social evolution is much faster, it goes by the decade, sometimes less.
All those things you mention are terrible aspects to city life. But it doesn't mean the city is bad. Cities get people much closer together and make the processes of exchange, and therefore production much smoother.
But we must, and will evolve to to the city. I was just in NYC over the weekend and it is a beautiful place, except the spectacle of Times Square. Central park was huge and very lively. And when you went down in the residential areas, people seemed to know each other very well. At least on a stree-by-street basis.
I personally think most should live in cities, so we can have very large wilderness in which to sabattical, camp, explore, train, etc.
:drool:

[Cencus]

I was more concentrated in the question how much people can live together in a community or lets say cities (i never said that we must live in a community of 60-100 people) without a law and still the people know each so well that everybody reacts to everybody in a proper way what means to know the strength and weakness of each person and in case to be able to compensate this instability.

That has been going on for hundreds of years already in our cities. If you live on a council estate or equivalent where you are from there basicly is no law. Someone burgles your home, the first call you make isn't to the filth, they don't give a toss if you are poor, it's to your friends/aquantances who might know someone. Folks generally don't go round kicking the shit out of each other not because of the law but because they don't want to. If your nieghbours in trouble you help them out. If someone beats their partner or kids, folks have a word. The last people you talk to are the police.

The working class have been living in such communities for a long time, drug addiction and the new right have taken their toll on these communities in the last 50 years but they are still there.

[Comrade Wolfie's Very Nearly Banned Adventures]

Lots of people would argue that cities are inherently oppresive, because the city does not/cannot create what it needs to sustain itself, so it has to depend on the rural world. Extrapalate this to a larger level, and you have the priniciple of imperialism, the developed world exploiting the third world, something I assume you agree with.

Are you in favor of division of labor?

Cities exist for a reason. I don't see what your going to replace them with? Huge spread out rural 'settlements'? Please explain how understanding the social nessecity for cities = support for imperialism?

The Division of labour is nessicary, unless you want to grow your own crops.

[The Douche]

Cities exist for a reason. I don't see what your going to replace them with? Huge spread out rural 'settlements'? Please explain how understanding the social nessecity for cities = support for imperialism?

The Division of labour is nessicary, unless you want to grow your own crops.

Yeah cities do exist for a reason, the industrial revolution necessitated the concentration of an available work force. And?

I would replace them with a society that is actually sustainable on this planet.

I didn't mean to imply that support for cities=support for imperialism, I was just trying to show how paralells can be drawn between the concepts of civilization and imperialism.

I don't know if I am ready to answer as to whether I agree with divison of labor.

[normtransformer]

Well all these i got during thinking how to make revolution so as i dont believe that we can realize it in the cities. I see the city as a bunker of power of the rich, of the capitalism. I imagine it with owning a house and somebody attacks me. Where is my best defense point? It is at the door and not at the gate of my garden. So to project it on a city i would say it will be very difficult to attack the parliament or government directly as the heart of a city. Instead to go out of the cities, build around it thousands of communities with 5000 or more inhabitants each and reenter slowly but sure into the center by modifying step by step the current cities in nature-humans-symbiose-communities. By making small communities all anarchist on this world should show that they are ready for so a big step, to leave this system, throw away his passport and destroy his banccard, to get in risk not to have enough medical support especially at the beginning. Chances are good and the method is very peacful, infact in many european states, anarchists are changing the strategy and going out of the city creating autonom agriculture communities.i dont think that nowadays the power would make a genocide on these people.

About division of labour i promise here and now to all humans on this world: if somebody thinks that i will stay on the fields and will put shit on the fields to prepare them for planting something and somebody thinks he has not to do it i will kick his ass. Everybody has to pass for a few years if you want so the time to learn what it means to plant his food, the work of a farmer and the life of animals. As i see that kids nowadays are getting allergies in cities because of absence of contacts with the nature, i think we should listen mother earth which is giving us the right message what is going on.

[ckaihatsu]

No one should have to spend a single minute at any kind of farming tasks when we have a fully industrialized agricultural infrastructure that massively leverages labor and provides immense returns of food, etc., for relatively little labor power. People have better things to do with their time.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

A key goal of communism was to break down the distinction between city and countryside. To eliminate the excesses and ills of huge centralized cities and the poverty and dullness of rural isolation. That this goal has been abandoned by today's communists is only another indication of how far they are from workers' socialism.

[ckaihatsu]

A key goal of communism was to break down the distinction between city and countryside. To eliminate the excesses and ills of huge centralized cities and the poverty and dullness of rural isolation. That this goal has been abandoned by today's communists is only another indication of how far they are from workers' socialism.


I don't presume to speak for anyone other than myself, and I would welcome any proposals from you that speak to your point, just in case you might happen to be implying something in my direction.

[WeAreReborn]

I couldnt think of anything worse than living in a community of 60-100 like you talk about in ur post.
Why do you? Many people like environmental communities. I personally like them and a city. So just because you don't enjoy them doesn't mean it isn't Communist or not. I am not a primitivist or anything just because I see the futility in it but you shouldn't be so aggressive and foolish in your arguments either. Communism doesn't have to be Marxist or industrial, please know this.

[normtransformer]

No one should have to spend a single minute at any kind of farming tasks when we have a fully industrialized agricultural infrastructure that massively leverages labor and provides immense returns of food, etc., for relatively little labor power. People have better things to do with their time.

Doesnt give me any explanation to the fact that our kids are getting allergies because of loosing more and more the contact with the nature. About the rumor that we get cancer because of our industrial "plastificated" life, i better dont start to talk.

[normtransformer]

No one should have to spend a single minute at any kind of farming tasks when we have a fully industrialized agricultural infrastructure that massively leverages labor and provides immense returns of food, etc., for relatively little labor power. People have better things to do with their time.

Well you said it well. when? i dont talk about how it will be maybe in the future. i talk about today. And today we know that we are far away from a industrialized agricultural infrastructure based on 100 % health guarantee by building it up. Or do you want to eat only gen manipulated tomatoes. Maybe you dont know it even anymore what it means to bite in a deformed small tomato. Many machines will not be able to harvest it and so i ask myself so or so how far we can influence nature to guarantee a healthy life as we know and there are proofs that with industry especially in agriculture we are loosing the quality of vegi and fruits. About animals, milk, BSE....we better dont discuss. No no already too much industry in agriculture....(A)

[normtransformer]

No one should have to spend a single minute at any kind of farming tasks when we have a fully industrialized agricultural infrastructure that massively leverages labor and provides immense returns of food, etc., for relatively little labor power. People have better things to do with their time.

Well you said it well. when? i dont talk about how it will be maybe in the future. i talk about today. And today we know that we are far away from a industrialized agricultural infrastructure based on 100 % health guarantee by building it up. Or do you want to eat only gen manipulated tomatoes. Maybe you dont know it even anymore what it means to bite in a deformed small tomato. Many machines will not be able to harvest it and so i ask myself so or so how far we can influence nature to guarantee a healthy life as we know and there are proofs that with industry especially in agriculture we are loosing the quality of vegi and fruits. About animals, milk, BSE....we better dont discuss. No no already too much industry in agriculture....(A)

[ckaihatsu]

Doesnt give me any explanation to the fact that our kids are getting allergies because of loosing more and more the contact with the nature. About the rumor that we get cancer because of our industrial "plastificated" life, i better dont start to talk.




Well you said it well. when? i dont talk about how it will be maybe in the future. i talk about today. And today we know that we are far away from a industrialized agricultural infrastructure based on 100 % health guarantee by building it up. Or do you want to eat only gen manipulated tomatoes. Maybe you dont know it even anymore what it means to bite in a deformed small tomato. Many machines will not be able to harvest it and so i ask myself so or so how far we can influence nature to guarantee a healthy life as we know and there are proofs that with industry especially in agriculture we are loosing the quality of vegi and fruits. About animals, milk, BSE....we better dont discuss. No no already too much industry in agriculture....(A)


Look, of course I'm not defending industrialism under capitalist organization and practice, but neither would I for a moment consider dispensing with industrial technologies as tool-usage. Reductionism has brought us the development of this kind of potential abundance -- we just need to free it from the reductionism of finance capital.

I won't attempt to speak to health or medical issues since I've always had little interest or experience with such matters.

[Aurorus Ruber]

I quite enjoy large cities myself, at least the few times that I've had the opportunity to visit. I've gotten quite weary of the intense conservatism that plagues rural areas and suburbs, at least in America. And communities of 60 or so people sound like they would bore me very quickly.

[manic expression]

Cities are a reflection of their societies, as well as the living memory of past ones. If a society pushes workers into cramped quarters near industry so they can profit from the cheap labor, the city will reflect that; if a society sanitizes its urban centers for the benefit of the rich and well-to-do, the city will also reflect that.

Cities can be "happy accidents" (ie formed organically over time) or purposefully designed from scratch, but in reality they are usually both. Cities are contradictory, but only because the societies that build them are even moreso. But that means the city is malleable, it takes on new roles when the mode of production necessitates them.

By the way, I lived in suburbia (the sprawl outside of the sprawl) for most of my life, and I cannot at all think of any logical, sensible reason for the continued prevalence of that lifestyle. Suburbia wastes energy, alienates people (especially the youth, who are made to be 100% dependent on someone else driving them somewhere, which also puts tons of unnecessary stress on parents), creates a cultural dead-zone and promotes racial division. Cities are the past, present and future.

[ckaihatsu]

I quite enjoy large cities myself, at least the few times that I've had the opportunity to visit. I've gotten quite weary of the intense conservatism that plagues rural areas and suburbs, at least in America. And communities of 60 or so people sound like they would bore me very quickly.


You may want to take a look at 'Moral Orel' -- it's a long-overdue, incisive satirical look at the Bible-belt culture that pervades the greater Midwest....





The program takes place in the fictional city of Moralton, in the fictional U.S. state "Statesota," which is made up of most of Kansas, western Missouri, north Oklahoma, and a portion of Arkansas. According to the globe shown in the opening credits, Moralton is in the exact center of the United States, with the town's church at the exact center of the town (and therefore the country).

The main character is Orel Puppington, a student at Alfred G. Diorama Elementary School, who constantly tries to live by the Protestant Christian moral code as articulated in church or by his father, Clay. Orel naively follows this "code" to its logical extreme, with consistently disastrous results. Overall the show seems to be a critique of the WASP archetype.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Orel


I think digital media and the net have done wonders for human civilization -- and intentional communities in particular -- simply by liberating us from the constraints of geography, time-sensitivity (realtime), and one-to-many (quasi-dictatorial) mass media. We're no longer dependent on physical cultural objects -- including all of the deprivations, burdens, and responsibilities of ownership that go along with it -- for the pleasures of culturally mediated interpersonal experiences, or mass culture. Of course there's still plenty that *cannot* be fit into the realm of digital-based media, and so there's still plenty of liberation outstanding, but the advent of many-to-many communications goes a fairly long way compared to the millenia of human societal experience that was the default before then....

[bcbm]

Look, of course I'm not defending industrialism under capitalist organization and practice, but neither would I for a moment consider dispensing with industrial technologies as tool-usage. Reductionism has brought us the development of this kind of potential abundance -- we just need to free it from the reductionism of finance capital.


industrial agriculture is bad for the land and usually bad for the people who work the land as well. it makes inferior crops on inferior soil and relies far too heavily on chemicals to both make the soil "fertile" enough to grow crops and kill pests, weeds, etc. there is also the issue of irrigation and water contamination. it is extremely wasteful. agriculture can and should be a more or less waste free system where all activities compliment each other. the closest we know to this is the way agriculture was practiced for thousands of years... rotating crops keeps the land fertile, the labor of animals makes the soil easier to grow on by churning it up and their waste enhances it as well, the animals are fed by eating things humans can't, like grass, etc. this isn't to say we should dispense with all of the tools of industrial agriculture, but their use needs to be undertaken holistically.

[ckaihatsu]

It's a good point. I saw a documentary not too long ago called 'Establishing A Food Forest The Permaculture Way (2008)', and it's quite eye-opening about what can be done on small scales in the direction of self-sufficiency.

That said, though, I think it would be better *logistically* to have a *societal*-based institution of food production, as we have now -- but without the capitalist economics around it, of course. Anything that's so basic and critical to personal well-being should be *standardized* against natural risks and other volatilities, and *not* left to the fluctuations of individual (or small-group) ability, no matter how well-intentional or capable.