Posted on 11/29/2012 5:29:21 AM PST by SJackson
Such a lifestyle was a "luxury" for a caveman who had been isolated or expelled from his community. That aside, it still doesn't undermine my original contention and you are still wrong.
Participation in a group/team hunt (or other endeavour) still falls under my basic three means of satisfying needs. If one participates in the group freely, then it is merely a contract (albeit an unwritten one) in which one contributes their efforts to the group goal in exchange for a share of the profits...or mammoth steaks as the case may be. If one's participation in the group is coerced without any promised or real benefits, that slave will still have to resort to theft, trade or his own use of force to satisfy his needs.
An interesting comment.
So let me add to that (I have some background in high production agriculture)
As far as I know the Egyptians owned their own land. The King and the temples also owned a good deal of land which they used to support themselves, but I think that most of the land was owned outright by the peasants.
The irrigation channels and the very crude techniques used to get water out of the Nile and into the ditches didn’t look like government sponsored operations. Basically buckets on a wheel.
They also had surveyors, apparently a job description nearly as old as prostition.
Egypt did not have as many people as it does today. Chronic illness as well as extremely low ag yield by today’s standards (1/16th of today’s yield? Maybe lower..) kept the population tamped down. Since Egypt was in the water borne disease zone I suspect that dysentery and malaria were common and took a lot of Egyptians early in life.
(The death rate in Massachusetts from water borne diseases was 1/20th of the rate of the Cheasapeake Bay area in Colonial America. Massachusetts was above the latitude in which water borne disease was common. That was one of the reasons the Pilgrims landed that far North. The latitude at which water borne disease was an issue was well known to our ancestors. I had always thought that it was a bit odd that the pilgrims went to a cold snowy area on the continent, but now it makes a lot sense to me.)
I am also not sure that the irrigation operations were quite as extenisve as the yearly flooding provide a huge amount of ground water in soil that was capable of holding on to it. I used to walk our fields that were located on the Mississippi and the black dirt was amazing. A bit like walking on a mattress as the dirt compresses one half to a full inch as you walk on it.
The flooding would also decrease the the amount of free nitrogen in the soil by large amounts and would really knock back the possible yield.
I am going to look at this as it simply is question I am sure has been asked but I have never asked it myself. Thanks for the comment.
Sesostris also, they declared, made a division of the soil of Egypt among the inhabitants, assigning square plots of ground of equal size to all, and obtaining his chief revenue from the rent which the holders were required to pay him year by year. If the river carried away any portion of a man's lot, he appeared before the king, and related what had happened; upon which the king sent persons to examine, and determine by measurement the exact extent of the loss; and thenceforth only such a rent was demanded of him as was proportionate to the reduced size of his land.
Organized by regional authorities, every Egyptian had to move about thirty cubic metres of soil in about ten days every year
The building of dams and canals was done at local or regional levels, and while in the past many held irrigation to be the prime cause for the emergence of a central government, most think nowadays that the involvement of the national government in the irrigation was probably minimal: the opening and closing of the canal sluices to Lake Moeris in the Fayum in order to regulate the flow of the river must have been a task for the central authorities.
The rights to water were as important as the land it was intended to irrigate. During the Late Period at least these rights could be sold like any commodity.
So their economic life required much government adminstration. As for the performance: "From the New Kingdom there are records of yields of between 5 and 10 sacks (200 kg to 400 kg) of corn per aroura (ca. 2800 m²) - about ¾ to 1½ tons per hectare - according to the quality and location of the field."
Simply, Socialism only works through coercion.
Capitalism is the free and un-coerced exchange of goods and services. It is really the only moral economic system.
Probably averaged about 1.1 tons per hectsre. Our average production per hectare is 10.5l tons so... Yields were quite low by our standards.
Thanks for the info on Egyptian agriculture. Quite interesting. It bears further research.
The principle difficulty with Bolshevism in general was that it overlaid a theoretically proletarian revolution with a decidedly non-proletarian cadre Lenin termed a "vanguard party" with its own class interests distinct from the economic ones that ostensibly drove the revolution. In short, an existing aristocracy of birth was replaced by a new one of party. It wasn't an improvement.
“The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.”
Not necessarily. If anything, the Utopians are only the second-most violent terrorists and oppressors of others. The ones who actually ARE the most violent, and arguably the worst of them, are the dystopians. And I can name a few during the French Revolution. In particular, the Marquis de Sade (yes, he was indeed very much involved with the French Revolution and Reign of Terror. Heck, you could argue that he fired the first shot at Bastille). And if you read what he had to say, it’s pretty obvious he had absolutely no desire for utopia, and if anything just wanted to make things worse just for a sheer kick. This was the guy who acted as the namesake for “sadism” after all. In fact, after being recruited by the Jacobins, he became one of its most radical members, and was specifically assigned to the Section des Piques, before ultimately being locked up again when even Robespierre couldn’t tolerate him any longer. Did I mention that for them to be “true republicans” in his view, he thought they should enact a law that allowed people free access to another person’s bodies? Essentially legalizing rape, in other words?
And on that note, we might as well include those directly inspired by Sade during that time, such as Jean-Baptiste Carrier, whose infamous “Republican Marriages” at the Loire he specifically described, borrowing a term coined by Sade himself, as being “Le flambeau de la philosophie”. Or how about the guillotines at Arras that were orchestrated by Joseph LeBon and his wife? That was also taken directly from one of Sade’s books, literally in this case since they actually stripped the freshly decapitated victims and put them in poses mirroring the illustrations for 120 Nights of Sodom. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn even indicated that Sade was pretty much tied with Rousseau as being the most influential person in the French Revolution (and Rousseau is probably closer to a utopianist)
And while we’re at it, Marx and to a certain extent his followers would be closer to an adherer to dystopia than to utopia, considering that he specifically advocated for not only reenacting Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, but also making it even gorier than ever before. I’ll even quote it for you: “Once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to reenact the year 1793…When our time comes, we shall not conceal terrorism with hypocritical phrases. . . The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envisage it.” Source: Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-505, final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 18, 1849. Quoted in Thomas G. West, Marx and Lenin, The Claremont Institute
And, oh, I’m not finished yet. Remember Sade and his ideology? Well, he got a follower centuries later by the name of Michel Foucault, and even he thought Sade didn’t go far enough. He also advocated that people give into their basest instincts and be, as Joker in The Dark Knight put it, little more than a common criminal. Going a bit further than Marx, he actually advocated repeating the September Massacres, and refused to promote courts, even Socialist ones. And during a debate with Chomsky, he actually advocated that everyone basically commit all the murder they want and upon gaining any power turn right around and oppress others. You can read up on that guy in the following links:
*http://www.conservapedia.com/Michel_Foucault
*http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/conferences/2008since1968/foucault_maoists.pdf
*https://usefulstooges.com/2016/10/14/totally-amoral-michel-foucault/
*https://chomsky.info/1971xxxx/
*https://stream.org/foucault-intellectuals-venerate-sado-masochistic-suicidal-drug-addict/
So, yeah.
“According to Marxist/Leninist theory, there are four phases to the revolution:
1. Revolution of the proletariat
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat
3. The withering away of the state
4. Ultimate freedom of the collective
Problem is: Phase 3 never seems to happen. “
The answer’s simple, really: Marx when he advocated for the “withering away of the state” was truly advocating for it to “wither away” the same way the French state did under the French Revolutionaries under Robespierre. Create a Wild West-style anarchistic area where people are free to commit all the murder and horrific acts their basest desires ever wanted, as you can see in the quote I posted.
But I do ultimately agree. The Bolsheviks were NOT good people, not even at the start, and Trotsky would have been as bad as if not worse than Stalin if he took over (probably going all “killing fields” on Russia as one person put it). And based on the fact that he wanted “permanent revolution”, a desire that was ironically echoed by Ernst Rohm of Germany, it’s pretty clear he’s closer to the dystopian view than the utopian view.
They didn't have the right people in charge. They needed to have the best, brightest, well educated, caring and compassionate people running everything. It will work next time. Honest it will.
Yes, thanks for pinging an old thread. Next time, it will be better. Another century, another few hundred million corpses. We'll get there.
Lord Acton, Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely
Lord Acton, not that well known, other quotes out there, but he got it right. Before the internet. The concentration today is far greater. Neither Mao nor Goebbels could have imagined it. Nor could they have imagined the opposition, should the opposition have access to the "media". Formal or other.
Yeah, I know, a few hundred years ago it was called the public square. Important.
Minor point, it's always bothered me that our Revolution and the French Revolution share the same last name. Quite different.
My one disagreement.
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat.....on to three and four.
Dictatorship requires leadership. At which point the concentration of power is established. Actually in point 1, revolution does't emerge from within. It also requires leadership.
It gave Robespierre supreme power.
There are all kinds of madmen in the world, but those who are purely destructive don't usually attain great power.
Thanks for those links.
L
Ping to post 47.
L
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