@@Bleilock1Sort of. It is quite Adam Smith 'capitalist', but quite different from modern finance driven capitalism. And to make it even more murky, a lot of finance was originally created to solve problems farmers have. Oh, and lots of farming can still be viewed as almost feudal. Except these days the peasants have been replaced with automation and/or migrant labour.
Small farmer in Ontario Canada here. Good thoughts all through the video. I feel the primary obstacle facing new entrants into farming is the valuation of farmland. It has been divorced from any realistic return on investment in the agricultural context. The acre of agriculturally zoned land is now predominantly valued as if it were a residential or commercial building lot up for grabs by the highest bidder by developers. Prices of between 10,000 - 30,000 dollars an acre do not pencil out. You cannot expect to ever service that debt by farming the land...let alone make a profit to live on. Offshore and domestic speculators, residential developers, are both hungry, wealthy, and prepared to essentially steal farmland away from ordinary farmers, or potential future farmers. Once it is covered with houses or shopping centers it is forever destroyed for food production. Then the farmers who give in and sell their multimillion dollar land near urban areas, proceed to outbid local farmers in lower priced areas and thus prices everywhere get driven up endlessly in a sort of societal suicide. None of it is sustainable. Enormous land holdings, amassed by established corporate farms over many years, are beyond the reach of most younger/newer/potential farmers or ranchers. And so the only buyers for those farms of several thousand acres are speculators and consortiums from other places. Think Bill Gates, China, etc. If the agricultural economy were allowed to exist apart from the larger real estate economy, and land was valued according to what it is truly worth as farmland, then most agricultural land here would sell for 1000-2000 dollars per acre, you could get a loan, farm the land, make the payments, and pay it off in ten years then begin actually making money farming it.
I started back in the game 10 years ago after being out for 8; I rent all my land, I'm regularly booted by the landlords for a better dollar after I spend the money on the farm it needs; small claims court for farmers is a joke; I have another job and honestly it's not really worth it; the public doesn't care, they want Walmart cheap instead of something local and tasty; look at other parts of the world and how they've killed the family farm; you won't see capitalism, you'll see as mentioned in the video a company offsetting profits....
In fact saying that something is overvalued is very misleading. Farming does have risks associated with it but owning the land does not. Simply put for a rich person with not so talented descendants liquadating your assets as you age and buying houses, shops and farmland, that your children can then rent is the ideal way to make sure they live a good life materially after you pass away. The payoff of investing in such assets is not comparable to business but the stability is much much better.
This is one of those clever-cloggs retorts people always pipe up with any time someone talks about farming economics. You should provide attribution as this is a well known quote, rather than your own insight (it was John F Kennedy)... It's also not true - I'm a farmer and I don't buy any of my inputs retail - and I don't know any that do. Only an idiot would (e.g.) but their seed from a hardware shop in town, or would not be VAT registered etc.
Your points are all well and good, but do any of them really suggest that farmers aren't capitalists? Farming might be regulated and subsidised and weather-dependent, and there might be more lucrative ends to their capital - e.g. housing - but even being able to talk about liquidating an asset means farmers are in a position to use capital to their desired ends. Assuming they own the land (i.e, not tenants) and sell their produce, this is materially no different to a factory owner, or a car dealership. You have assets, whether that's a factory, a sales-room and stock, or a farm, and use them to produce goods that are then sold. Farmers have capital - wealth in the form of land, available for the purpose of growing crops which they sell for profit or subsistence.
yes farmers could be viewed as capitalists. but the return for the input is low and rarely tracks inflation or not at all. unless a farmer owns a lot of land selling some of it might not be an option.
@@goodgod77 Sure, but that's true for most capitalists. Most small business owners don't have much capital. The title of this video is 'Why Farmers are Not Capitalists', which was not answered.
@@goodgod77 whether or not they get a rough deal in the prices they are still making decisions based on capitalism. Just because someone’s getting screwed in business doesn’t mean they’re socialists.
I came here to make exactly that point. I think this guy is a little bit loopy as he hasn’t really proposed another economic model that farmers would fall under other than briefly talking about socialism which they do not fall within. Just because there’s some differences in the way these businesses operate. It doesn’t mean that they are not operating within the economic model of capitalism. They buy and rent land at market prices. They sell their commodities at market prices and sometimes actually often under contract these days. An overproduction of wheat in the global market reduces prices and underproduction of wheat increases prices. If a farmer wants to sell his eggs for four dollars he can but he’s competing with other people who are selling theirs for three dollars. The government is not selling the eggs for three dollars, and they are not sharing the profits with the people… I think this whole thing is a little bit silly, and we could make arguments about the small details, but in the end, there is no other economic model that he can make a case for that would not hold up to scrutiny.
I think the reason farmers reject the socialist label mentioned in the video is because they have a system that’s older than socialism. The traditional farm isn’t a union of individual workers who agree to benefit each other but either a family unit which has its own hierarchy and division of labor which is also separate from the capitalist system.
Your preferred lifestyle or sensibilities don’t suddenly make you a follower of a political philosophy either. Barry Goldwater gave his workers healthcare at a time when it wasn’t typical or required, but opposed it as a government policy. Doesn’t make you a socialist
Although the American style Yeoman farming, of the kind you allude to, predates Marx, communal farming is just as ancient as familial farming. It's just a matter of which society or cultural and during what time frame you look at. Whether or not you want to label communal farming as socialist, communist (in the Marxist sense), anarchist, etc, is another discussion.
@@Alexius1Komnenos well sure if he gives healthcare himself then he sets the terms and gains all the control. if he waits for a popular movement to force the government to force *him* to take care of his employees, he has no control anymore. so he reinforced the existing order and placated the workers at the same time. very anti-socialist if you take socialism to mean democracy in the workplace.
@pgf289 probably the fact that they're on a faraway island in the south pacific meaning it's vastly more expensive to import anything than it is elsewhere helps A LOT
To anyone here who hasn’t read “The Grapes of Wrath”, it is extremely important American classic literature written by John Steinbeck that describes the journey of a farming family whom was forced off of their land by the big banks and were forced to pack up everything and move west during the depression and dust bowl era of the 1930s. If you are into reading truly great literature it’s a fantastic read.
There is no "free market". In almost no area of economics. Capistalism is not " free" . Not in a sense that privates trade with privates without state interference. Privates (mostly big ones) influence politics so politics rule in their interest. Agriculture is not a free market, at all. Its one of the most regulated and subsdize economic activities. Love your videos. Loved this one. But the title is misleading. Tanks anyway.
Pedant here. Under its original definition coined by Adam Smith, 'Free Market' Originally referred to a market free of rent seeking and monopolistic behaviour, not a total vacuum of governmental regulation. When investors chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a company pays in rent - licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc - is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services.
@@jackbucher2049The market for land was predicated on homesteading, and therefore does involve arbitrary amounts of rent seeking. We need something like Georgism to address rent seeking through land ownership.
1. Land cannot be in a free market. Ownership is government controlled. Lets say you were a German who own a castle and lands in WW2, if it was in Bavaria, you probably get to keep it, but if it was in Koenigsberg, then for sure you no longer own it. 2. Humans need food. We don't get to opt out of food. We can opt out of consumer electronics, concert tickets, luxury items, but not food. 3. Agriculture and everybody else have opposing incentives. A farmer actually profits during a famine (assume he has crops left to sell). An abundance of crop is actually detrimental to the farmer but a wonderful thing for everybody else. 4. Farming food takes lots of time. We cannot simply turn on the factory and make food instantly. 5. In order to make sure there is a steady supply of food for the population, we must ensure an abundance of crop. That means forcing farmers to overproduce. Economically, that hurts the farmer because the product will have low prices which may not cover costs. So, we must compensate farmers so that they overproduce. Its like the military. We compensate servicemembers for risking their lives for our mutual defense. If we leave it to the free market, volunteers and charity, there may not be enough defenders since the volunteers and suppliers of the effort would be at a loss while the non-contributors gain.
Hmmm... Perhaps if we did just have enough to go around, and actually SHARED it, there wouldn't be anything to fight such stupid wars over? Thus negating any reason for any sort of military that the comparison ended with
Humans can do modern drugs and suppress appetite, further reducing the demand for food and driving up the price without increasing the supply. The drug cash crop is going to be the majority crop grown in the USA.
@@solb101they're compensated like any other employee to a business or self-employed contractor. Private meaning privately funded as opposed to publicly funded.
Hidden landowners. 17% of land in England and Wales remains undeclared at the Land Registry. Someone owns it - we just don’t know who. There is a strong likelihood that the owners of this undeclared land are members of the aristocracy and gentry, meaning that their combined share of the country may in fact be far higher than 30%. Because aristocratic estates remain in families for centuries, they are not generally sold on the open market, and will not have needed to be recorded with the Land Registry. According to Anna Powell-Smith, the Land Registry has committed to comprehensive registration by 2030, though it is unclear how this will be achieved. Powell-Smith and Shrubsole propose a government requirement to make all land registered, with details of its beneficial owner, before it can receive farm subsidies. Given the amount of land used for farming, it is hoped that this would incentivise owners to register the land and help solve the mystery of England’s undeclared land.
how is it possible to have land that the estate doesn't know who own it? if there is no name, it is free for grabs, and if someone doesnt show up it either becames state property or someo elses invades and get to own it, at least in my country of brasil
@@astk5214From my understanding, the default in the U.K. has historically been a lack of registered ownership (at least after 1086), land is only registered if it changes hands. Therefore, any land that hasn’t been sold in the last few decades (possibly owned by aristocrats or the church) is unregistered with the government. Just because the land is unregistered doesn’t mean it isn’t owned.
I am a capitalist dairy farmer I produce a niche product (raw guernsey and Jersey milk). I sell it for as high as I think I can. I don’t have my hand out every month taking whatever the processor decides they want to pay me.
@@goodgod77 possibly or that Farmer’s are suckers for not demanding enough for their product. Co-ops were supposed to fix this problem but the mentality of Farmer’s is they are too easy and even most of the “farmer owned” co-ops are screwing them.
@@guernseygoodness farmers have plenty of times asked and protested for a bigger slice of the pie to no avail. i would agree to some point that farmer co ops do screw the farmer but what share do farmer owned co ops have of the market. multi nationals nestle etc. are the real price setters
I think the main problem is that you can ask for whatever price you want for nieche products, but a mill will not really care for what type of grain they get, so you have to put prices similar to those in China and India, who can undercut because of better subsidies and colectivist farming practices
Wow. I think I need to send this to the Education Department at Lloyds Bank! This is a fascinating and coherent appraisal of our English Farming System at least. Thank you for your efforts, and how thrilled I am to see a younger man's passion for our industry at work.
You say that farming emissions are dominated by Methane which is correct, however you then go on to say that methane decays in the atmosphere which is also correct, however it's important to note that methane decays *into* CO2. It doesn't just disappear. It starts out as a very potent greenhouse gas, and slowly turns into a less potent greenhouse gas.
You’re an analysis of farming is very impressive and you speak very well as most Brits do. However, I think you’re overthinking the farming thing and you’re leaving something very important out of the equation; the love of farming and the land, plus family and faith. there are many, very young farmers in their 20s and even teens who are buying their own land, yes, going deep into debt because they love farming. Certainly they realize they will never become wealthy and will work much harder and put in many more hours, than say an industrial or retail job. I follow 30 or so farming families in the US and many say that the income from these TH-cam videos has built their homes and purchased farm equipment allowing them to survive as farmers.
In South Africa things are very different we have 3 vineyards and always set our prices,the people we outsource to understand that's just business.Also the university nearby gets charged for using our land for practicals. But I love the analysis you've done.We generates tons of profit with very little government assistance
Title is a bit misleading. The whole video is about the United Kingdom only. Historical and current circumstances are very different in other countries, making some of Orwin's problems non-existent or different.
Is farming and finance compatible? It is an economic activity. It is a necessity. It stands alone when it comes to human endeavours, second to nature which is free from monetary gain or loss. Do like his insights and delivery style.
I've been going through all of your videos and it's amazing how this perspective is so rare in any mainstream "left" discourse. Between the academic left and the "online" left there seems to be very little interest in actually engaging with production as a concept, especially domestic production. Stuck between techno-optimism and non-scientific organic farming fantasies. Surely anyone concerned with third world exploitation must realize that globalization in a "post" colonial world will lead to more exploitation and third world economies that can't diversify while being locked into comodity export markets. And if we want to take our collective foot off the neck of the developing world we have to substitute their exports with domestic production. All this to say that I wish more people on the left were exposed to these ideas and realities, thank you for making these! Looking forward to the next one.
What do you mean by non-scientific organic farming fantasies? I am work living on a permaculture installation and its really hard, but we find it totally possible to do it fruitfully. It just takes a lot of work. I live somewhere with a large hippy culture and they seem largely resistant to the level of work that it actually requires. You still need concrete. You still need diesel and gasoline. You absolutely still need electricity and automation electronics, grow lights, etc. But it is actually organic, and actually productive.
My view of capitalism would be closer to the idea of democracy . In any workplace there is no democracy. Sure, unionisation. However those that make all the decisions on what happens with the capital, what is produced, what people are paid etc is usually at the whim of a small number of high paid board members or a small number of share holders with votes. The workers who build said company have no say if, after decades of service, that company decided to move to the third world in seek of greater profits, devastating said community, leaving them with largely no means (machinery, tools, infrastructure, capital) to seek some other form of production and livelyhood for their community Any sensible country would have laws in place that either allow the majority and minority vote in a SME organisation and laws that allow the purchase of said company by the citizens, under loan, or some other subsidy.. however, countries often let their citizens be left the short end of the stick when these companies make decisions that negatively impact them. There is no democracy, there is no good from companies. They care about profits, their shareholders, not those that serve and sacrifice for them to become successful
Great video. Perspective changes everything. Fair I think to say that there should be restrictions on who/what can own land. It certainly shouldn’t ever be allowed to be an investment.
One note I want to add is that some of the older reasons for why farming doesn't work very well in a market economy don't really apply anymore, and economists are aware of this. The "learning literature" in economics---which considers agents who learn how their economy works over time--has found that farmers can accurately learn what prices will be given current weather patterns, and plant the free-market maximum profit-yielding amount of crops. For those interested, I encourage a look into the cobweb model of production.
Some areas of farming have operated within the free market for decades - pigs, poultry, horticulture. Worker ownership of the means of production would not anticipate individual workers owning their own means of production to the exclusion of others and having the freedom to sell it to whomever they wished.
Something rarely said. These three enterprises are relied on to contribute significantly to the food we eat yet has no subsidy and sells product for a fraction of the subsidised beef and lamb and, until recently, milk. The housewife knows pork, bacon, lamb, potatoes, cabbage and cauli, carrots and onions and so much more is cheap to buy and is low cost for the Exchequer.
Want to have my own little agriculture farm one day, good video! One note, under a capitalistic system, the farmer who owns their means of production and works the land would be petty bourgeoisie. If that farmer has one worker on a wage, they would be taking that workers surplus value hence not making it a socialist relation. Under this system, unfortunately, competitiveness is forced, and profits are made to be more important because they are linked to ur living conditions.
If farmers hire people and machinery to work on their own private land, to produce goods that the land owner will negotiate on the market, how is this not capitalist? You might be a small capitalist, with not enough cash flow to differentiate you much from your workers, but the way you make your living is essentially different from them. That makes farmers capitalists.
@@kkon5tiso actual farmers that farm the land, not landowners claiming to be farmers by only owning land that's farmed on by the actual farming workers? Owning a farm and actually farming aren't synonyms, so to end the dispute i say everyone claiming to be a farmer must actually farm And so no one ends up owning a farm and not farming, we can just end private property of agrarian land so that the land is public and free to be used by anyone wanting to farm on it. Anyway, must be nice to live somewhere where there's been land reform instead of living in an feudal agrarian society where land is owned by huge multinational corporations and oligarchs/aristocrats whilst the land is farmed by literal slaves and workers in "conditions that are analogous to slavery". Would also be nice to not have an agribusiness owned congress and politicians in all institutions at every level of government that protect the agribusiness bourgeois ruling class from any consequences for literally burning down the amazon rainforest and genociding the native peoples there. However bad you think agriculture is in brazil, it's infinitely worse. And the world's dying because of it, much more literally than you could possibly fathom. Yes you can do something, which is to support the land reformists pushing the government to enact the land reform it's been promising for decades and has already been due for centuries before. They're the Landless Workers Movement(MST) and you can buy a hat from their website, donate, or just follow their social medias and spread the word. They're on the frontline defending the earth from capitalism's predatory extractivism that also causes further climate catastrophes. We can't save the earth from a climate apocalypse without the Brazilian land reform, the country's THE farm for billions worldwide, and 70-80% of all emissions are directly tied to the agribusiness industry causing deforestation to create new cattle settlements to destroy the soil with soy plantations and produce methane with waaaaaay too many cows, and other emissions directly linked to the brazilian agribusiness industry.
If farming didn't work under capitalism, we'd all have starved to death by now. It operates differently, but is held together by the same forces as all work. That doesn't deny tenant farmers have it hard - but that is a separate issue.
Capitalism is about profits, and most food, if produced at profit, would price out the poor. So the government subsidises most food. China is the world's biggest producer of cheap food, and their work is almost entirely supported by the government. In the US, the government in the past intervened when there was excess food, so farmers would not make a big loss.
Farming as an industry is dependent on subsidies tariffs import quotas and every other interventionist policy you can imagine and this is the case worldwide. When countries fail to protect their farmers from foreign competition they fail see Haitian rice as an example.
Excellent video, thank you for your research and the time you took to present it. I am glad that I found your channel. My opinion is that we should view history in the context of it's time. In your video you are referencing a specific period when food was very expensive and hard to come by. Millions of farmers were heading off to fight the Great War and there were food shortages and rationing. Although we as farmers today may not be motivated solely by profit, we are acting on a global commodity market and and our buyers will try to go for cheaper. This changes when global supply chains are disrupted, for example in for mentioned times of war. This is why every country should keep an effective agricultural sector by subsidizing domestic agricultural production and controlling imports. Planned collectivization only worked with the Israelis and the Kibbutz system, everywhere else it was a disaster.
Ok so I don't know if this is an idea that's already in use BUT. What if we used to stock market to speculate on the harvest and have the investment pay the farmer a fixed amount no matter the result? They'd be pressure to drive the price up to a point where the farmer can look at their input costs and see there's profit to be made before investing a dime into it. It would also naturally push the farmer toward growing what's most likely to grow, as the market would study what has the best chance of being harvested (But would still have to accept lower returns occasionally for crop rotation). To take the capital costs out of the equation all the land and equipment is owned initially by the state and is issued to the farmer at a lease cost which should be low because they can use purchasing power to buy equipment in bulk and move machinery and storage allocation around between farmers based on need and capacity. Now to give the farmer the incentive to make sure the crop has a good yield by allowing a good harvest outcome to start to reduce the lease payments by the percentage of the assets costs. If it's a good yield, the lease costs go down by a fraction of a percent or more. If it's a bad yield (Farmer got paid more in the agreed amount speculated on the crop) then the lease cost goes up a fraction of a percent or more. Here's the kicker, the stock market has people also betting that the crop will have a bad yield, so the payments on this put is used to pay the farmer out an agreed amount (less than the payment for a good output) If the cause of the bad harvest is due to adverse weather conditions but not for any other reason, (So if it's due to planting to early or late in the season or errors in the paddock from say, adding too much fertiliser and as a result burning the crop that's on the farmer). Alternatively, if they have the capital they can purchase the land and pay it off conventionally with a bank loan and simply lease the equipment only instead. Any harvest which makes more money than the farmer gets in their agreed payment, it's used as a measure of how much less money they need to pay on their lease of equipment and/or land. Essentially if the lease cost reaches 0 they've either paid off the land and now own it. (if they've leased it to begin with or their equipment leasing costs are now 0). Bear in mind a series of bad farming harvests after this may drive the price of the equipment up again. If the farmer gets out of farming earlier the equipment would go back to the state and be repaired and reused elsewhere. Now they may choose to give up before paying the land off, they should still make money on good harvests if they had picked crops with high payments on them, less their expenses (The crop seeds, fuel, fertiliser and pesticides) I think it might add some stability into farming
There are some systems for speculation in future crops where traders buy the option to buy a coming harvest. Farmers here have their own insurances. Finance is part of their cooperative work.
Farms can sort of pause production. in Australia during drought destocking is done ASAP. This can mean, getting rid of everything except your breeding stock. moving breeding stock to another area with no drought or buying feed. Choosing not to sow (if this is possible, usually not easily possible). They may also harvest before flowering to turn the crop into fodder as the crop is dying/dead anyway.
"...and then you have to buy tractors and implements and stock..." sounds to me that farmers require quite a bit of capital. Farmers need the land, the crops and the tools to work, I'd argue a farmer is already a capitalist. Even closer to the model of a free market, less the oligopol we've today. Oligopol as in a few companies rule the market, behaves a bit diffrently than the ideal. Also quite a few rules and regulations (some quite needed, other more akin to barriers or tools of big corps vs little ones) with subsidies being the deciding factor. Concerning farming I'd say we`ve arrived at the opposite of the free market, we've got state controlled farming via the subsidies. In that sense I'd agree farmers are not capitalist, as there is no free market.
Great thought provoking video! I do agree that land-owned farmers business should be distinguished from more extractive, monopolistic, and financialised business systems involved in the equity market. However, The land-owned farmers activities are capitalist, as they follow these activities: 1. For profit entrepreneurship 2. Private ownership of the means of production 3. Market exchange as means of allocation 4. Wage labour The main difference is that they are getting ripped off by a dysfunctional market, as well as the natural limitations of profit making that you mentioned. Socialist sectors in uk include public-owned parts of nhs and education system.
There are a few other main actors in food. The consumers don't really have the power to not eat food, but they can slide sideways into cheaper brands and they retain the power to vote. "People who eat food" is probably a pretty large electoral block. Distributors are both chains and wholesale traders. Sometimes they have both roles, a wholesale trader can own a chain. Food gots to reach people. This can include some competition or a trust. The fewer they are, the more pressure they exert. They are in turn more or less pressured by consumers. Industry processing is closer to industrial production. There is room to abruptly change suppliers, to evaluate competing ones. Sometimes the industry is independent, sometimes owned cooperatively. How much processing varies. There is a negotiation with distributors on a market.
Id be keen to see what you make of the Australia meat deal along with Jerermy Clarksons new pub. Personally I think favour of union between Pubs and Farms within the UK ecconomy could be a viable long term solution.
Hi, farmworker here! I appreciate and subscribe to this channel :) Around 8:45 you seem to imply that methane is not a form of carbon in the atmosphere, which it most certainly is. Furthermore, the result of methane decay is just more atmospheric CO2--as I am sure you are aware, so the idea that this somehow separates agriculture from other industries seems off to me. I think you make a much better point with the comment that agriculture is situated within the carbon cycle. Aside from the fossil fuels burned by farm vehicles and embodied emissions in farming inputs, the rest of the movement of carbon that happens in agriculture follows natural processes of primary growth and metabolism that are all part of the natural carbon cycle.
Actually not. Methane (CH4) contributes with the production of ozone (O3) on atmospherci sublevels. Its 20x more aggressive than carbon dioxide (CO2) but lasts 12 years instead of 150 of CO2. If you dont have enought trees your cattle operation is not carbon negative (as you implied as "natural carbon cycle). Study about it
I would somewhat agree if you follow traditional agricultural models the way it's taught at colleges. There's been many agricultural innovations in the last 40-50 years where many of these issues are minimized. Even the issues tenant farmers face can be mitigated by using things like movable infrastructure. I'd suggest looking at some of the work done by Joel Salatin, Mark Sheppard, Richard Perkins and Darren Doherty. Personally I think the key to the success of farming is not more specialization in farming but more generalization. Joel Salatin has a great talk he gave about fiefdoms, which is available on youtube. I highly recommend watching that as a starting point.
Your video is incredibly cogent, well-researched, and well-produced, and your arguments are fascinating. Have you ever read G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc's arguments for Distributivism (pursuing a large Yeoman class as a policy objective)? Would you be interested in doing a podcast episode on our channel talking about the economics of farming, cash-crop vs subsistence farming, the mixed upsides and downsides of the green revolution, and related topics?
As usual you open up another overlooked chapter in farming history to very illuminating effect. Fascinating about Orwin and you explain beautifully what an unusual market chain farmers are located in. But I disagree with you about capitalism. As the post-War Marxist historians argued (Hill, Hobsbawm et al) capitalism first developed in English farming. Aristo land owners became rentiers, while their tenants were small scale capitalists who hired labour (former serfs) to work the land, even if they usually mucked in too. Crucially, and this is what defined farmers as capitaliists, they extracted surplus value from their workers. Today, as you say, many farms are worked solely by family members because of the development of ag. tech. But they remain small capitalists - even the 14% of farms which are still tenanted require expensive equipment. Strikes me that British farmers are classic petiit-bourgeois, squeezed by big capital, monopsony, nature, the vagaries of government policy ... .
You need to reexamine your understanding of capitalism. It is the investment of “capital” in order to increase income and build wealth . Every small businessman (petit bourgeois ) and owner-operator is, in fact, a Capitalist. Employing others who are paid a wage is NOT the criteria. Also, employing people is not “extracting surplus value”. It is a recognition that the employee does not create the whole value of the product. The person or persons who provide the raw material, the premises, the means (tools and machinery) and market the product also contribute to the value. Wages and profit are simply how the value of the product are apportioned.
My view of capitalism would be closer to the idea of democracy . In any workplace there is no democracy. Sure, unionisation. However those that make all the decisions on what happens with the capital, what is produced, what people are paid etc is usually at the whim of a small number of high paid board members or a small number of share holders with votes. The workers who build said company have no say if, after decades of service, that company decided to move to the third world in seek of greater profits, devastating said community, leaving them with largely no means (machinery, tools, infrastructure, capital) to seek some other form of production and livelyhood for their community Any sensible country would have laws in place that either allow the majority and minority vote in a SME organisation and laws that allow the purchase of said company by the citizens, under loan, or some other subsidy.. however, countries often let their citizens be left the short end of the stick when these companies make decisions that negatively impact them. There is no democracy, there is no good from companies. They care about profits, their shareholders, not those that serve and sacrifice for them to become successful.
In short, the capitalism we have today is merely exploitation. And you get a vote every four years for some shcmuck who's gonna finish his term 10x richer than when he started. That's why most politicians, at least here in Australia, all go and work for large corporations and get paid the big bucks for all their hard work and knowledge at screwing over regular citizens What a sought after skill that is haha
@@ValleysOfNeptune2150 A very false understanding…. one that despises wage-earners as having zero agency or understanding of their decisions. Firstly, the employee has as as much right to leave the company, as the company has to sack him. In fact, he has more right. There are very few legal restrictions on withdrawing your labour, no matter what the implications are, the costs of replacing you and teaching someone else the skills that you have acquired and are taking with you. Secondly, you very much DO have control over your wage. You exercise that control when you agree to take the hobby, and you exercise it every time you continue to sign on instead of going elsewhere to find a job with a higher wage - if you can convince someone else that you are worth it. Thirdly, if the company goes bust, those who own it lose the results of year’s of effort, maybe a lifetime’s. Your loss is limited to the costs of finding other employment. Fourthly….. what on earth gives you the idea that ever floor-sweeper should have as much input into managing the company, as those who built it from the ground up? If you want to run a business, go start your own. That is what Liberty is…. not demanding a say in something that somebody else built. Just be aware that if you DO work for yourself, you will work longer hours with no overtime rates and no holiday pay. You will rapidly find that the “Boss” who looks back at you from the mirror, is a bigger slave-driver than any foreman you’ve ever met.
@@peterwebb8732 well aware mate - was once like you.. I'm not talking about small business owners I hear your point , your free to fuck off elsewhere, I know the sentiment well Same goes for plenty of people moving countries, out of oppressive regimes, they go elsewhere - it's a thing as old as human civilisation and common as air That's not my point at all My point is closer with the idea that large multinational companies aren't held accountable for the economic damage they do in societies Case in point: in Australia over the last 25 years our manufacturing and industry has been decimated - companies take all their profits and just ship to other countries, leaving a long strew of damage in communities , environmental damage , and completely divesting in our youth education etc Our governments do nothing to prevent the harm done which far exceeds their costs Now, we must rebuild an entire sector with taxpayer money - over 300 billion of it I might add It's a vicious cycle. If people had a say in what a branch of a company did in its local community These economic and environmental damages just would happen, rarely, if at all.. Sure the small business owner should be able to do what he wants, I was one myself But when it came to expanding, my only motive was profit, not training, not helping my community - so yes I would be looking in the mirror at the slave driver - but is that what we really want? Is what I began to ask myself.. money is great But long term prosperity, independence, and sovereignty for my countrymen, My children, and the benefit of my community And that should be the goal of everyone and every government Not to let some big company come in, harvest our minerals, work out people and then leave when they can make more without consequence, only an insane person would allow that I agree, people have the choice everyday, but oh how they sell themselves short for a quick buck in the short term There are no victims only volunteers, the sad truth.
An economic barrier to entry, seems like it should be a thing of the past due to pushes in Urban Farming over the past 20 years or so. You don't really need land to start a farm as much as you need to know how to grow plants indoors. The thing about farming as a whole is that it can range from people looking to have a more sustainable source of food to industrialists who are looking to optimize production in order to reach larger markets. A student growing their vegetables hydroponically in their center city apartment to have their own supply of vegetables while supplementing their income by selling produce at the summer farmer's market is as much of a farmer as someone growing 6 acres of garlic in a rural landscape. I think overall, farming sees itself as something different from industry, which allows for it to fight for legislation to treat it differently which sort of allows it to be stuck in it's own conservatism.
I do enjoy having my beliefs challenged in good faith. I always had a dim opinion of farmers. Thinking of them as capitalists who own a mean of production. This video explains this is not the case. You have done your demographic a service.
Here in New Zealand we call dry stock farms: ‘large lifestyle blocks’. And we call small lifestyle blocks: ‘Life Sentence Blocks’. The poor return on investment here is crazy. The dairy farmers here are more capitalist in the way they think, but even they don’t make much money now. It’s a miserable industry at the moment.
The fundamental problem with capitalism is that it considers land as capital. Land is not capital; land is the SOURCE of all capital. In other words, it is the source for ALL resources. And since each human has a right to life in our systems; we all also have an implicit right to the resources needed to sustain our life. Those resources must either be provided without cost to the people who have been denied access to land thru land deed schemes, or they must be allowed to live on the land and gain their own subsistence without obligation to ANY landlord. This principle is demonstrated in prisons where people have been denied the right to obtain their own resources, therefore necessary resources are provided to them… and demands that they work to attain those resources would be considered a forced labor encampment. Common Law had no provisions for remote land ownership. You had to occupy the land to “own” it. This makes logical sense when it comes to adequate resource allocation for everyone on the planet. The planet is the common inheritance of all who abide on the planet; that is why land “ownership” is a work of fiction that exists only on paper, backed up by the guns of the lazy and powerful. ✌🏼
I believe you might like Georgism, if you don't already. Its a quite niche idea that the land should be owned in common via 100% land tax (not property tax, just taxing the value of the land itself not the buildings/farms/assets on the land).
I enjoy your videos, thank you. I think of restaurants as socialist, because the people club their money together to afford what they could not afford alone, and they benefit themselves as a community by doing so. Of course people will say that I am wrong, but that is a given.
Yes, but to be a capitalist you need to live off the work of your employes. Small farmers often own the means of production (land, machines) but still have to work themselves there, they are usually petit burgeoise, therefore neither proletarian nor capitalist.
If farming wasn't feasible why do farmers remain in agriculture? If farming wasn't feasible why do manufacturers make equipment for farmers? If farmering wasn't feasible why don't farmers sell up? Farmers have had a BOOM since the end of WW2 and their LAND and the FARMSTEAD has seen a HUGE increase in values, it is the hidden wealth/gold mine that farmers don't crow about when farms do come up for sale. If in my business I bought an industrial unit for £20,000 in 1960, today it would probably be worth £750,000 to £1,5MIllion subject to condition, yard area, access and other key features. Also, farmers escape a lot of tax, one of them being they can run on rebated diesel (red diesel) unlike the construction industry which has to suffer the use of white diesel in plant machinery. Farmers are feather bedded where other industries are ignored!
Here in NZ we call it asset rich cash poor. But some come unstuck because there’s not enough cashflow to pay the expenses. They have to carve off a small piece and sell it to keep the wolf from the door.
This is why Georgism splits Capital and Land. Farmers often want to do something not very productive with their land (growing crops), rather than doing the most productive thing (building houses). The government supports this through subsidies. At least that's how it is in Maryland, USA; where land prices are very high, but we still have farmers tying up land that could be used for infrastructure. A Land Tax helps to put the least sensible farms out of business, which could go to support other farm stabilization policies.
Because farming has become corporatised. Large companies with big cash reserves are able to pay for the best stuff outright. Farming really sucks as a job. It’s a vocation. Long hours, hard labour, and the return on that just isn’t worth it when expenses are taken into account. People go into it because they’re from a rural community and their family did it. It’s very rare that someone from the city would go to a farm to make a living and actually make it long term.
Due to inflation £60k in 1960 is £1.2M in 2024. Right in the middle of your valuation estimate. That land didn't increase in value, the currency the land is valued in just decreased in value. And I'll believe that price when it is actually sold and minus all the fees and taxes.
Now you mentioned lower labour costs-yes, but to buy the machines you need a lot of money so you need to pay off you debt. So in the past you were regularly paying wages, now you are are paying off credits. No matter good or bad year, season or not
food is most oppressed in retail pricing and farmland is overpriced because of building potential . food for a dollar but iphones for a thousand dollars .
This analysis is so mistaken, albeit that maybe there’s a Wittgenstinian point about the use of the word “capitalist”. Farmers are paradigm capitalists. They have to take the resources (capital) available to them - the land they own or rent, their livestock and machinery, and their financial resources, whether retained profit or bank facility, to produce crops and/or animal products. They have to buy seed, animal feed, fertilizer, fuel and services such as veterinary help or servicing of machinery and ensure that they can sell for as good a price as possible to recover the annual costs, the cost of servicing their capital (rent and interest), any labour costs and ensure that they have made enough to live off and provide capital for the next year’s cycle (although the cycle may be less than a year in some specialist or quasi-industrial operations, such as chicken hatcheries). This is capitalism in one of its purest forms. Farmers are not the only capitalists at risk from the weather. Ask any proprietor of any tourist or leisure-based business. The land is not an inexhaustible resource. Its value lies in its fertility, and there are countless examples from history where it has been lost - our Brecklands, those parts of central China whose eroded soils became the loess deposits elsewhere, the abused chernozems of Ukraine in the Soviet era. Have you ever seen a Fenland blow? They are also not the only capitalists at risk from the “market” - every business supplying products or services in a market economy (most being regulated for good political reasons - whether this works well is another question) is at risk from changes in the buying habits of their customers. In my lifetime even the “learned professions” have discovered this to be the case. I come from a farming family, but like my brothers decided that getting up at 3 am to deal with a difficult calving was not for me, so went to university, qualified as a solicitor and entered private practice, being a partner (i.e. capitalist entrepreneur selling professional services) for 33 years. OK, there may have not been any early mornings struggling to get a calf out of a distressed cow, but it was just as stressful and uncertain as running the family dairy farm. Orwin seems to be under the impression that only large joint stock companies are capitalists and that they are somehow immune to these pressures. This now looks incredibly naïve. Remember British Leyland, GEC, Woolworths, ICI, Pan-Am, and many other examples of large capitalist enterprises, once seen as invincible giants of their national economies that have failed due to competition and failing to provide products and services that the customers wanted. It is also untrue that farmers cannot change what they do to respond to changing markets. The mostly annual cycle of most farms is much shorter than the product development cycle of most manufacturing businesses. Orwin should have read his contemporary A G Street’s Farmer’s Glory to see how farmers had to be (and were) flexible in their farming activities in the 1930s to respond to changing market and governmental policy conditions. The land ownership position is also not as set out. Not owning the land you farm does not prevent you being a capitalist - you simply have rent as a capital cost. While the price of land has increased in the last 50 years various investors have acquired agricultural land as a long-term investment, it fell during the inter-war period and in the prolonged agricultural depression of the late 19th century that lasted until the First World War. And as to labour, agriculture is in exactly the same position as any other business enterprise, except that the flight from the land has been enormous, driven by low pay, working conditions that are unattractive to most and mechanisation removing much of the need for large numbers of unskilled workers, except in those sectors (like vegetable growing) where the need tends to be seasonal and unable to support full-time employment. Finally, as to the bars to entry, this is something that is not unique to farming. In the service sector, you are likely to have to invest heavily in IT. The general high cost of property affects anyone who needs premises for their proposed business. Any machinery you need will be sophisticated, computer-controlled and is likely to be expensive with limited sources of supply Farmers live in the same changing world as the rest of us. They are possibly even more subject to the whims of government policy than some, but as a retired deputy money laundering officer in one of my firms, I am not certain that the Rural Payments Agency is any worse (slower perhaps!) than any governmental organisation you have to dela with, in the UK or elsewhere. Nonetheless, I am interested in this, so will subscribe! BTW - I recommend reading Clifford Selly’s Ill Fares the Land if you can find a copy for an insight as to where we were in the early 1970s and what were then seen as the challenges for farming in Britain.
Fucking hell, if anything isn't capitalist it's joint stock companies, capital means private property and publicly traded corporations are PUBLIC (from the Latin publica, meaning 'common' aka *shared.)* property.
By the Marxist definition, only the biggest farmers (those who are so big that they do not work their farms themselves, but have employees for all the practical work) can be called capitalists. Those who own their land but have to work on it themselves, would rather be petite bourgeoisie.
Quick fact check: when methane oxidises in the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to produce 2.75 times its mass in carbon dioxide. The carbon doesn't magically disappear. That's on top of the fact that in the time before it decays, it's a very significantly more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So - is it really possible for intensive farming (as in, intensive enough to feed everyone without lots more deforestation) to be non extractive? - Not convinced! Unrelatedly, I always had the impression that the classification of farming as capitalist in the popular imagination, refers specifically to the idea that lots of farms these days have landlords that are "big ag" companies who like short term returns and who pressure farmers into using unsustainable techniques to increase yield and extract dividends at the expense of the land. I always thought that this idea was being deliberately contrasted with smaller farmers who own their own land and have a long term interest in it.
There is a bunch of people I class as seasonal labour. They are labourers but for one reason or another they are not working year round. Oil riggers wouldn't stand living a whole year on a platform, tourist season is a few months, crops are harvested at set periods or not at all. In practice you need to either make enough in those periods to afford going idle a few weeks or months, or have a second job.
Again i'd like to object to the use of the political terminology here. A socialist is someone with socialist political leanings, independent of their occupation and class, while a proletarian/worker is someone who sells their labour in exchange for a wage. A bourgeois/capitalist is someone who owns capital, which includes farmers though as explained in the video they have different needs and modes of managing their business compared to an industrialist with a monocle and top hat. If anything, from what you described a farmer resembles an artisan the most, who's both the owner of the tools for his labour and the one doing the actual work
A socialist is also a worker owning the means of production. There is nothing wrong in saying that. As per definition of the „inventor“ of socialism. Don’t confuse someone of the ideology with what the ideology contains, even when it is described by the same term. This comment to me comes off as another disappointing example of capitalist realism.
Interestingly, the futures and commodities markets are developed out of the uncertainty of farming before capitalism became a concept...which points to their inherent capitalist nature...
You are correct in categorizong the small farmer a true socialist. Socialism is where the worker owns the means of production, and a small independent farmer is exactly that. Ditto for "mom and pop" small businesses. Having the state own the business or farm "on behalf of the people" is Communism, not socialism. One thing you overlooked in your video is the impact of hyper regulation, especially in this era where those making the regulations are utterly disconnected from those they are regulating.
It just depends on whether you own the land you work or part of it. Alot of rich people in the UK hold land as a way to avoid tax, if it's big enough to be a farm they pay someone else to work it, the rich hold the land, the asset, the capital.
The problem i see is the farmer can't set the price of his own product. that's not free market capitalism. A farmer should be able to sell to who he wants and negotiate a price. Instead the commodities people found a way to legally dictate a price where the farmer has no say...
Hence, government subsidies. Powering the large number of cookbooks and TV how tos and fashionable spots about the trendy eateries. Almost a charity, in many ways, and not a series of accidents as subsidies are involved, in the form of contracts. Many historical equivalents. Liked the ones about why many in the Old World left because of the oppressive landowners or royalty as they were often seen to be oppressive (serfs or the equivalent) to come to the New World to become landowners themselves in the pattern which they had alleged to be fleeing. The most recent example of this is when, during the US Civil War, Lincoln started the Homestead Act that gave free of charge, certain amounts of land, often previously occupied by the original locals, it they improved cited land in an agricultural way. Lincoln did this as he had thought that the referenced War was going to last a while, and he had wanted a way to feed the North's troops.
All the economic problems with farming are simply related to the cost of acquiring the land. If it was really so hard, then land would be as cheap as chips.
Was never into framing, but somehow got this video recommended. Know nothing about C.S. Orwin except fo what you told in this video, but can tell you that Russian communist had imposed state ownership of the land and the crops in their own nation and in nations the conquered (like my own, Ukrainian nation) and that resulted in artificial famines, like Holodomor, which were in turn deliberately exacerbated by Russians as a means of quelling any resistance in other non-Russian nations which lived under the occupation of Russian Soviet regime. Which is why Ukrainians view it not only as a disastrous economic measure, but also as a gemocide (becauuse all the artificial famines of the 30-s were somehow harder on non-Russian nations). That said, it is still a dubious economic policy which might seem attractive only because Britain haven't tried it on a national scale. At it's core is a substitution of mutch land owners with just one - the state. But how well could it work, concidering that the state is not the farmer and just another landowner who is much more incline to impose measures (rather than negotiate) than any private land owner.
agrarian capitalism is very different than financialized capitalism. productive land has inherent value, and if there's a bank willing to lend on that value, thar blurs the lines between those two.
The video is informative and sheds light on the economics of farming. You however didn't tell us how Farmers are not Capitalists, or rather you should have started by defining your understanding of capitalism
If you own the means of production and sell your goods on a market -> You are by Definition a Capitalist. Now, not every "Farmer" owns his own means of production, there are Farmers who only have rented the means of production from a owner. They don't really own the Farm yet manage it. There its like CEO and sahreholder. Either way you work on a market and you produce things to sell them on it. This means all capitalist pressures and Laws apply to you just like any other industry.
I think you are misunderstanding capitalism. Simply having a free market does not make something capitalist. It is all about who profits the most from the labor, the workers who do the work or the person who put up the capital. The market does not make any difference there are just as many if not more forms of socialism that allow for a free market as there are capitalist systems that have no market be it state controlled economies or monopolies. But you are somewhat right poultry and pig farming as well as dairy are often capitalist enterprises in the factory farm system but at the same time most of those factory farms are not selling on the open market.
@@FakeSchrodingersCatYou are incorrect. Capitalism is the investment of Capital, in order to increase income and build wealth. A sole-operator who employs nobody is a capitalist. A small-businessman who rents his premises is still a Capitalist… both have invested their own money - be it in land, livestock, machinery, tools or trading-stock - in order to increase their wealth. Renting farmers are no different, as you would know if you’d ever gone through the exercise of stocking a farm, buying machinery and sowing a crop. You spend the money FIRST and (hopefully) make a profit LATER. That is how Capitalism works. The people you envy just do it on a larger scale.
@@peterwebb8732 there are cases where Farmers hardly can live from their income and are in debt. They don‘t own anything and could with enough oversight paranoia die on hunger while working on the basic food system. I would classify them as a modified form of lumpenproletariat. They produce food yet can‘t live from the food they create cause they have to sell it immediately to cover their debts and would get punished for stealing their own produce cause, for example, the chickens they produce are technically not their property from egg to slaughter. They are by all metrics merely workers and nothing more. Farmers who own are all capitalists.
@@peterwebb8732 So all socialism is capitalist. Again you don't understand capitalism it is about ownership. Socialists setting up a business also require investment the difference is that investment does not automatically convey ownership.
Agriculture still relies on seasonal labour, in usa mexican illigal labour and in europe eastern europeans, eith al the labourlaws being ignored for that time of year
I had no idea farmers could rent farmland. I thought you had to own it. Even the farmers have landlords! 😢 Also seeing the price of those tractors gave me the sweats! Crazy expensive
You are no taking into consideration, that a modern society provision is made, to the support farmers with subsidies. Thus ironing-out the worst wrinkles. Also the structure of UK farming is still feudal and can't be use as a general standard.
Farming the way it has been practiced by the European tradition, going back to the pre indo European peoples, is inherently using up the soil. We do not return human refuse to the land so there will always be a drift of certain nutrients away from the plot they are harvested from. Also the low amount of soil cover is a huge contributor to continuous soil erosion. Yes croprotation, fertilizer and animal excrement do prolong the half-life of our soils, but we never fully close the cycle. With our horrendous addiction to synthetic/ mineral based fertilizers we have made a huge showing of that with the modern day phenomenon of regular devastating algae blooms. A future prove farmer has an endless amount of problems and as human habitation goes on, fewer and fewer solutions. In Europe at least, the most sustainable models are almost entirely free market supported, granted they have a comparatively small customer base that has disproportionate wealth, but the conventional agricultural model is almost entirely subsidy dependent.
You need to start with defining your terms. You claim farming doesn't work in a free market and then go on to describe all the laws and government regulations that made it not a free market in farming.
Landlords , climate and all variables organizing crops , as well as fix constraints that can't adapt rapidly to the market are not linked to government
yeah the title and conclusion is a stretch just to spark some chat. it seems like a lot of people are calculated in what and how they post, with the aim to receive more comments.
By definition, if you are producing more product than you need to feed your family in order to sell it, you are working under capitalist thinking. This would only apply to a homesteader who farms to feed their family, and trade to fill the gaps of what they don’t produce.
You are conflating markets and capitalism. Capitalism describes the organization around the system of production (e.g. privately owned production & wage labor). Markets describe the exchange of goods and services. You can have markets without capitalism!
@@howardroark3736 the person i replied to said that it is capitalist behaviour to make money from trading goods and services. Also implying that producing surplus is a capitalist endeavour. I just wanted to clarify that simply 'making money' or 'turning a profit' is not reserved for capitalism. We have documentation of surplus production way before capitalism. Also, following market principles is not sufficient grounds to describe a system of production as capitalist behaviour. I did not say capitalism has no (free) markets. I simply said markets can exist outside of capitalism. Which in return does not mean that markets dont exist in capitalism. Markets exist in various (political &) economic systems, not just capitalism. Do you think the forum romanum (e.g. in 200 BC) where goods are exchanged for a price is an example of capitalism in action? Aspects people actually agree that capitalism is predicated on is 'private property' and 'for profit operation' thereof. Please look up the definitions for capitalism and market economy.
Sure they are exercising "capitalist thinking" in the sense that they engage in capitalism in terms of selling for profit. But they dont really mainly generate capital to be gained and reinvested - they generate revenue at their own workplace to create comfort of their own. They are specifically small business owners / petty bourgeois, not capitalists.
Farming in a nutshell (if you own your farm): Asset rich, Cash poor, worth lots, earn little.
But you create generational wealth
@@mr.abbott212that was before all the subsidies and inflation
Sounds capitalist to me...
@@tadghostal8769farming is nothing without subsidy
@@Bleilock1Sort of. It is quite Adam Smith 'capitalist', but quite different from modern finance driven capitalism. And to make it even more murky, a lot of finance was originally created to solve problems farmers have.
Oh, and lots of farming can still be viewed as almost feudal. Except these days the peasants have been replaced with automation and/or migrant labour.
Small farmer in Ontario Canada here. Good thoughts all through the video. I feel the primary obstacle facing new entrants into farming is the valuation of farmland. It has been divorced from any realistic return on investment in the agricultural context. The acre of agriculturally zoned land is now predominantly valued as if it were a residential or commercial building lot up for grabs by the highest bidder by developers. Prices of between 10,000 - 30,000 dollars an acre do not pencil out. You cannot expect to ever service that debt by farming the land...let alone make a profit to live on. Offshore and domestic speculators, residential developers, are both hungry, wealthy, and prepared to essentially steal farmland away from ordinary farmers, or potential future farmers. Once it is covered with houses or shopping centers it is forever destroyed for food production. Then the farmers who give in and sell their multimillion dollar land near urban areas, proceed to outbid local farmers in lower priced areas and thus prices everywhere get driven up endlessly in a sort of societal suicide. None of it is sustainable. Enormous land holdings, amassed by established corporate farms over many years, are beyond the reach of most younger/newer/potential farmers or ranchers. And so the only buyers for those farms of several thousand acres are speculators and consortiums from other places. Think Bill Gates, China, etc. If the agricultural economy were allowed to exist apart from the larger real estate economy, and land was valued according to what it is truly worth as farmland, then most agricultural land here would sell for 1000-2000 dollars per acre, you could get a loan, farm the land, make the payments, and pay it off in ten years then begin actually making money farming it.
Much the same here in Australia
That’s fucking insane pricing it’s a 10th of that in australia
I started back in the game 10 years ago after being out for 8; I rent all my land, I'm regularly booted by the landlords for a better dollar after I spend the money on the farm it needs; small claims court for farmers is a joke; I have another job and honestly it's not really worth it; the public doesn't care, they want Walmart cheap instead of something local and tasty; look at other parts of the world and how they've killed the family farm; you won't see capitalism, you'll see as mentioned in the video a company offsetting profits....
change your vantage point. Brandon Joe Williams explains it well.
In fact saying that something is overvalued is very misleading. Farming does have risks associated with it but owning the land does not. Simply put for a rich person with not so talented descendants liquadating your assets as you age and buying houses, shops and farmland, that your children can then rent is the ideal way to make sure they live a good life materially after you pass away. The payoff of investing in such assets is not comparable to business but the stability is much much better.
Farming is the only business that buys at retail, sells at wholesale and pays the freight both ways.
And believes that it is a business.
Also most farmers are supermarket customers for food
Not where we farm, all major inputs most definitely bought in bulk, bar all the small occasional stuff..
This is one of those clever-cloggs retorts people always pipe up with any time someone talks about farming economics. You should provide attribution as this is a well known quote, rather than your own insight (it was John F Kennedy)... It's also not true - I'm a farmer and I don't buy any of my inputs retail - and I don't know any that do. Only an idiot would (e.g.) but their seed from a hardware shop in town, or would not be VAT registered etc.
@@tidytttI don't think you understand the quote
Not just farming; Labourers for example technically sell their time at wholesale.
Your points are all well and good, but do any of them really suggest that farmers aren't capitalists? Farming might be regulated and subsidised and weather-dependent, and there might be more lucrative ends to their capital - e.g. housing - but even being able to talk about liquidating an asset means farmers are in a position to use capital to their desired ends.
Assuming they own the land (i.e, not tenants) and sell their produce, this is materially no different to a factory owner, or a car dealership. You have assets, whether that's a factory, a sales-room and stock, or a farm, and use them to produce goods that are then sold.
Farmers have capital - wealth in the form of land, available for the purpose of growing crops which they sell for profit or subsistence.
Absolutely!
yes farmers could be viewed as capitalists. but the return for the input is low and rarely tracks inflation or not at all. unless a farmer owns a lot of land selling some of it might not be an option.
@@goodgod77 Sure, but that's true for most capitalists. Most small business owners don't have much capital.
The title of this video is 'Why Farmers are Not Capitalists', which was not answered.
@@goodgod77 whether or not they get a rough deal in the prices they are still making decisions based on capitalism. Just because someone’s getting screwed in business doesn’t mean they’re socialists.
I came here to make exactly that point. I think this guy is a little bit loopy as he hasn’t really proposed another economic model that farmers would fall under other than briefly talking about socialism which they do not fall within. Just because there’s some differences in the way these businesses operate. It doesn’t mean that they are not operating within the economic model of capitalism. They buy and rent land at market prices. They sell their commodities at market prices and sometimes actually often under contract these days. An overproduction of wheat in the global market reduces prices and underproduction of wheat increases prices. If a farmer wants to sell his eggs for four dollars he can but he’s competing with other people who are selling theirs for three dollars. The government is not selling the eggs for three dollars, and they are not sharing the profits with the people…
I think this whole thing is a little bit silly, and we could make arguments about the small details, but in the end, there is no other economic model that he can make a case for that would not hold up to scrutiny.
I think the reason farmers reject the socialist label mentioned in the video is because they have a system that’s older than socialism. The traditional farm isn’t a union of individual workers who agree to benefit each other but either a family unit which has its own hierarchy and division of labor which is also separate from the capitalist system.
Your preferred lifestyle or sensibilities don’t suddenly make you a follower of a political philosophy either. Barry Goldwater gave his workers healthcare at a time when it wasn’t typical or required, but opposed it as a government policy. Doesn’t make you a socialist
Although the American style Yeoman farming, of the kind you allude to, predates Marx, communal farming is just as ancient as familial farming. It's just a matter of which society or cultural and during what time frame you look at. Whether or not you want to label communal farming as socialist, communist (in the Marxist sense), anarchist, etc, is another discussion.
So true.
Farmers used to be enthusiastic socialists before McCarthyism.
@@Alexius1Komnenos well sure if he gives healthcare himself then he sets the terms and gains all the control. if he waits for a popular movement to force the government to force *him* to take care of his employees, he has no control anymore. so he reinforced the existing order and placated the workers at the same time. very anti-socialist if you take socialism to mean democracy in the workplace.
I’m an Englishman who farms in NZ. Making more money with lower prices and 0% subsidies. Not even red diesel!
Care to elucidate as to why? Bigger farms?
Better climate Better genetics higher productivity no government subsidies
Why, what is different
@pgf289 probably the fact that they're on a faraway island in the south pacific meaning it's vastly more expensive to import anything than it is elsewhere helps A LOT
@@pgf289the reason why is britain sucks
To anyone here who hasn’t read “The Grapes of Wrath”, it is extremely important American classic literature written by John Steinbeck that describes the journey of a farming family whom was forced off of their land by the big banks and were forced to pack up everything and move west during the depression and dust bowl era of the 1930s. If you are into reading truly great literature it’s a fantastic read.
There is no "free market". In almost no area of economics. Capistalism is not " free" . Not in a sense that privates trade with privates without state interference. Privates (mostly big ones) influence politics so politics rule in their interest.
Agriculture is not a free market, at all. Its one of the most regulated and subsdize economic activities.
Love your videos. Loved this one. But the title is misleading. Tanks anyway.
What does tanks mean?
Pedant here. Under its original definition coined by Adam Smith, 'Free Market' Originally referred to a market free of rent seeking and monopolistic behaviour, not a total vacuum of governmental regulation.
When investors chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a company pays in rent - licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc - is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services.
@@jackbucher2049The market for land was predicated on homesteading, and therefore does involve arbitrary amounts of rent seeking. We need something like Georgism to address rent seeking through land ownership.
Capitalism without the state is just feudalism
@@Prometheus7272 Means he's a tankie, clearly
0:14 subscribing is not free. I’d have to hit the button.
1:04 economics is the dismal science. Economists are scientists
So, your comments were not free
Free labour
@@LogicNotAssumed social sciense 😂😂😂
1. Land cannot be in a free market. Ownership is government controlled. Lets say you were a German who own a castle and lands in WW2, if it was in Bavaria, you probably get to keep it, but if it was in Koenigsberg, then for sure you no longer own it.
2. Humans need food. We don't get to opt out of food. We can opt out of consumer electronics, concert tickets, luxury items, but not food.
3. Agriculture and everybody else have opposing incentives. A farmer actually profits during a famine (assume he has crops left to sell). An abundance of crop is actually detrimental to the farmer but a wonderful thing for everybody else.
4. Farming food takes lots of time. We cannot simply turn on the factory and make food instantly.
5. In order to make sure there is a steady supply of food for the population, we must ensure an abundance of crop. That means forcing farmers to overproduce. Economically, that hurts the farmer because the product will have low prices which may not cover costs. So, we must compensate farmers so that they overproduce.
Its like the military. We compensate servicemembers for risking their lives for our mutual defense. If we leave it to the free market, volunteers and charity, there may not be enough defenders since the volunteers and suppliers of the effort would be at a loss while the non-contributors gain.
Hmmm... Perhaps if we did just have enough to go around, and actually SHARED it, there wouldn't be anything to fight such stupid wars over? Thus negating any reason for any sort of military that the comparison ended with
Who compensates the mercenaries and private armies then?
Humans can do modern drugs and suppress appetite, further reducing the demand for food and driving up the price without increasing the supply. The drug cash crop is going to be the majority crop grown in the USA.
@@solb101they're compensated like any other employee to a business or self-employed contractor.
Private meaning privately funded as opposed to publicly funded.
This is the most bafflingly stupid comment I've read in a while, I want to study your brain
Hidden landowners. 17% of land in England and Wales remains undeclared at the Land Registry. Someone owns it - we just don’t know who. There is a strong likelihood that the owners of this undeclared land are members of the aristocracy and gentry, meaning that their combined share of the country may in fact be far higher than 30%. Because aristocratic estates remain in families for centuries, they are not generally sold on the open market, and will not have needed to be recorded with the Land Registry. According to Anna Powell-Smith, the Land Registry has committed to comprehensive registration by 2030, though it is unclear how this will be achieved. Powell-Smith and Shrubsole propose a government requirement to make all land registered, with details of its beneficial owner, before it can receive farm subsidies. Given the amount of land used for farming, it is hoped that this would incentivise owners to register the land and help solve the mystery of England’s undeclared land.
And than 95 % is Luxembourg registered
@@benjamindejonge3624 first actually good thing brexit kinda protects you from
Based.
how is it possible to have land that the estate doesn't know who own it? if there is no name, it is free for grabs, and if someone doesnt show up it either becames state property or someo elses invades and get to own it, at least in my country of brasil
@@astk5214From my understanding, the default in the U.K. has historically been a lack of registered ownership (at least after 1086), land is only registered if it changes hands. Therefore, any land that hasn’t been sold in the last few decades (possibly owned by aristocrats or the church) is unregistered with the government. Just because the land is unregistered doesn’t mean it isn’t owned.
I am a capitalist dairy farmer I produce a niche product (raw guernsey and Jersey milk). I sell it for as high as I think I can. I don’t have my hand out every month taking whatever the processor decides they want to pay me.
does this prove that there are too many middle men taking profits
@@goodgod77 possibly or that Farmer’s are suckers for not demanding enough for their product. Co-ops were supposed to fix this problem but the mentality of Farmer’s is they are too easy and even most of the “farmer owned” co-ops are screwing them.
@@guernseygoodness farmers have plenty of times asked and protested for a bigger slice of the pie to no avail. i would agree to some point that farmer co ops do screw the farmer but what share do farmer owned co ops have of the market. multi nationals nestle etc. are the real price setters
Raw milk eh? So you're shifting all the real burdens and costs onto society paying for the illnesses
I think the main problem is that you can ask for whatever price you want for nieche products, but a mill will not really care for what type of grain they get, so you have to put prices similar to those in China and India, who can undercut because of better subsidies and colectivist farming practices
Wow. I think I need to send this to the Education Department at Lloyds Bank!
This is a fascinating and coherent appraisal of our English Farming System at least.
Thank you for your efforts, and how thrilled I am to see a younger man's passion for our industry at work.
*sigh*
*Puts on hazmat suit*
*Scrolls down to comments section*
Refreshingly intelligent analysis which I find realistic (many of my family have farmed).
You say that farming emissions are dominated by Methane which is correct, however you then go on to say that methane decays in the atmosphere which is also correct, however it's important to note that methane decays *into* CO2. It doesn't just disappear. It starts out as a very potent greenhouse gas, and slowly turns into a less potent greenhouse gas.
You’re an analysis of farming is very impressive and you speak very well as most Brits do. However, I think you’re overthinking the farming thing and you’re leaving something very important out of the equation; the love of farming and the land, plus family and faith. there are many, very young farmers in their 20s and even teens who are buying their own land, yes, going deep into debt because they love farming. Certainly they realize they will never become wealthy and will work much harder and put in many more hours, than say an industrial or retail job. I follow 30 or so farming families in the US and many say that the income from these TH-cam videos has built their homes and purchased farm equipment allowing them to survive as farmers.
In South Africa things are very different we have 3 vineyards and always set our prices,the people we outsource to understand that's just business.Also the university nearby gets charged for using our land for practicals. But I love the analysis you've done.We generates tons of profit with very little government assistance
Title is a bit misleading. The whole video is about the United Kingdom only. Historical and current circumstances are very different in other countries, making some of Orwin's problems non-existent or different.
Is farming and finance compatible? It is an economic activity. It is a necessity. It stands alone when it comes to human endeavours, second to nature which is free from monetary gain or loss. Do like his insights and delivery style.
I am in awe that there is video footage of guys sowing a proper field by hand. Not even a horn seeder!
I recently discovered this channel, shame it has so few views. Every video is so interesting
I've been going through all of your videos and it's amazing how this perspective is so rare in any mainstream "left" discourse. Between the academic left and the "online" left there seems to be very little interest in actually engaging with production as a concept, especially domestic production. Stuck between techno-optimism and non-scientific organic farming fantasies. Surely anyone concerned with third world exploitation must realize that globalization in a "post" colonial world will lead to more exploitation and third world economies that can't diversify while being locked into comodity export markets. And if we want to take our collective foot off the neck of the developing world we have to substitute their exports with domestic production.
All this to say that I wish more people on the left were exposed to these ideas and realities, thank you for making these! Looking forward to the next one.
What do you mean by non-scientific organic farming fantasies? I am work living on a permaculture installation and its really hard, but we find it totally possible to do it fruitfully. It just takes a lot of work. I live somewhere with a large hippy culture and they seem largely resistant to the level of work that it actually requires. You still need concrete. You still need diesel and gasoline. You absolutely still need electricity and automation electronics, grow lights, etc. But it is actually organic, and actually productive.
Best comment here
My view of capitalism would be closer to the idea of democracy . In any workplace there is no democracy. Sure, unionisation. However those that make all the decisions on what happens with the capital, what is produced, what people are paid etc is usually at the whim of a small number of high paid board members or a small number of share holders with votes. The workers who build said company have no say if, after decades of service, that company decided to move to the third world in seek of greater profits, devastating said community, leaving them with largely no means (machinery, tools, infrastructure, capital) to seek some other form of production and livelyhood for their community
Any sensible country would have laws in place that either allow the majority and minority vote in a SME organisation and laws that allow the purchase of said company by the citizens, under loan, or some other subsidy.. however, countries often let their citizens be left the short end of the stick when these companies make decisions that negatively impact them. There is no democracy, there is no good from companies. They care about profits, their shareholders, not those that serve and sacrifice for them to become successful
Great video. Perspective changes everything. Fair I think to say that there should be restrictions on who/what can own land.
It certainly shouldn’t ever be allowed to be an investment.
One note I want to add is that some of the older reasons for why farming doesn't work very well in a market economy don't really apply anymore, and economists are aware of this. The "learning literature" in economics---which considers agents who learn how their economy works over time--has found that farmers can accurately learn what prices will be given current weather patterns, and plant the free-market maximum profit-yielding amount of crops. For those interested, I encourage a look into the cobweb model of production.
Some areas of farming have operated within the free market for decades - pigs, poultry, horticulture. Worker ownership of the means of production would not anticipate individual workers owning their own means of production to the exclusion of others and having the freedom to sell it to whomever they wished.
Something rarely said. These three enterprises are relied on to contribute significantly to the food we eat yet has no subsidy and sells product for a fraction of the subsidised beef and lamb and, until recently, milk. The housewife knows pork, bacon, lamb, potatoes, cabbage and cauli, carrots and onions and so much more is cheap to buy and is low cost for the Exchequer.
Want to have my own little agriculture farm one day, good video! One note, under a capitalistic system, the farmer who owns their means of production and works the land would be petty bourgeoisie. If that farmer has one worker on a wage, they would be taking that workers surplus value hence not making it a socialist relation. Under this system, unfortunately, competitiveness is forced, and profits are made to be more important because they are linked to ur living conditions.
The relation between georgism and farming could make an interesting video.
If farmers hire people and machinery to work on their own private land, to produce goods that the land owner will negotiate on the market, how is this not capitalist?
You might be a small capitalist, with not enough cash flow to differentiate you much from your workers, but the way you make your living is essentially different from them. That makes farmers capitalists.
Yes that does make it so. Focus here is on farmers that still do the real work themselves.
@@kkon5tiso actual farmers that farm the land, not landowners claiming to be farmers by only owning land that's farmed on by the actual farming workers?
Owning a farm and actually farming aren't synonyms, so to end the dispute i say everyone claiming to be a farmer must actually farm
And so no one ends up owning a farm and not farming, we can just end private property of agrarian land so that the land is public and free to be used by anyone wanting to farm on it.
Anyway, must be nice to live somewhere where there's been land reform instead of living in an feudal agrarian society where land is owned by huge multinational corporations and oligarchs/aristocrats whilst the land is farmed by literal slaves and workers in "conditions that are analogous to slavery".
Would also be nice to not have an agribusiness owned congress and politicians in all institutions at every level of government that protect the agribusiness bourgeois ruling class from any consequences for literally burning down the amazon rainforest and genociding the native peoples there.
However bad you think agriculture is in brazil, it's infinitely worse.
And the world's dying because of it, much more literally than you could possibly fathom.
Yes you can do something, which is to support the land reformists pushing the government to enact the land reform it's been promising for decades and has already been due for centuries before.
They're the Landless Workers Movement(MST) and you can buy a hat from their website, donate, or just follow their social medias and spread the word.
They're on the frontline defending the earth from capitalism's predatory extractivism that also causes further climate catastrophes.
We can't save the earth from a climate apocalypse without the Brazilian land reform, the country's THE farm for billions worldwide, and 70-80% of all emissions are directly tied to the agribusiness industry causing deforestation to create new cattle settlements to destroy the soil with soy plantations and produce methane with waaaaaay too many cows, and other emissions directly linked to the brazilian agribusiness industry.
@@Ewr42 agree
If farming didn't work under capitalism, we'd all have starved to death by now. It operates differently, but is held together by the same forces as all work. That doesn't deny tenant farmers have it hard - but that is a separate issue.
Farming works in a slave system just as well.
@@andyjones1982histroy says otherwise
Capitalism is about profits, and most food, if produced at profit, would price out the poor. So the government subsidises most food. China is the world's biggest producer of cheap food, and their work is almost entirely supported by the government. In the US, the government in the past intervened when there was excess food, so farmers would not make a big loss.
If it worked then it wouldn't be so reliant on subsidies
Farming as an industry is dependent on subsidies tariffs import quotas and every other interventionist policy you can imagine and this is the case worldwide. When countries fail to protect their farmers from foreign competition they fail see Haitian rice as an example.
OH MY WORD I HAVE WANTED A CHANNEL LIKE THIS TO EXIST SINCE FORVEER
Excellent video, thank you for your research and the time you took to present it. I am glad that I found your channel. My opinion is that we should view history in the context of it's time. In your video you are referencing a specific period when food was very expensive and hard to come by. Millions of farmers were heading off to fight the Great War and there were food shortages and rationing. Although we as farmers today may not be motivated solely by profit, we are acting on a global commodity
market and and our buyers will try to go for cheaper. This changes when global supply chains are disrupted, for example in for mentioned times of war. This is why every country should keep an effective agricultural sector by subsidizing domestic agricultural production and controlling imports.
Planned collectivization only worked with the Israelis and the Kibbutz system, everywhere else it was a disaster.
Ok so I don't know if this is an idea that's already in use BUT. What if we used to stock market to speculate on the harvest and have the investment pay the farmer a fixed amount no matter the result? They'd be pressure to drive the price up to a point where the farmer can look at their input costs and see there's profit to be made before investing a dime into it. It would also naturally push the farmer toward growing what's most likely to grow, as the market would study what has the best chance of being harvested (But would still have to accept lower returns occasionally for crop rotation).
To take the capital costs out of the equation all the land and equipment is owned initially by the state and is issued to the farmer at a lease cost which should be low because they can use purchasing power to buy equipment in bulk and move machinery and storage allocation around between farmers based on need and capacity.
Now to give the farmer the incentive to make sure the crop has a good yield by allowing a good harvest outcome to start to reduce the lease payments by the percentage of the assets costs.
If it's a good yield, the lease costs go down by a fraction of a percent or more.
If it's a bad yield (Farmer got paid more in the agreed amount speculated on the crop) then the lease cost goes up a fraction of a percent or more.
Here's the kicker, the stock market has people also betting that the crop will have a bad yield, so the payments on this put is used to pay the farmer out an agreed amount (less than the payment for a good output) If the cause of the bad harvest is due to adverse weather conditions but not for any other reason, (So if it's due to planting to early or late in the season or errors in the paddock from say, adding too much fertiliser and as a result burning the crop that's on the farmer).
Alternatively, if they have the capital they can purchase the land and pay it off conventionally with a bank loan and simply lease the equipment only instead.
Any harvest which makes more money than the farmer gets in their agreed payment, it's used as a measure of how much less money they need to pay on their lease of equipment and/or land.
Essentially if the lease cost reaches 0 they've either paid off the land and now own it. (if they've leased it to begin with or their equipment leasing costs are now 0).
Bear in mind a series of bad farming harvests after this may drive the price of the equipment up again.
If the farmer gets out of farming earlier the equipment would go back to the state and be repaired and reused elsewhere.
Now they may choose to give up before paying the land off, they should still make money on good harvests if they had picked crops with high payments on them, less their expenses (The crop seeds, fuel, fertiliser and pesticides)
I think it might add some stability into farming
There are some systems for speculation in future crops where traders buy the option to buy a coming harvest.
Farmers here have their own insurances. Finance is part of their cooperative work.
Farms can sort of pause production. in Australia during drought destocking is done ASAP. This can mean, getting rid of everything except your breeding stock. moving breeding stock to another area with no drought or buying feed. Choosing not to sow (if this is possible, usually not easily possible). They may also harvest before flowering to turn the crop into fodder as the crop is dying/dead anyway.
"...and then you have to buy tractors and implements and stock..." sounds to me that farmers require quite a bit of capital. Farmers need the land, the crops and the tools to work, I'd argue a farmer is already a capitalist. Even closer to the model of a free market, less the oligopol we've today. Oligopol as in a few companies rule the market, behaves a bit diffrently than the ideal. Also quite a few rules and regulations (some quite needed, other more akin to barriers or tools of big corps vs little ones) with subsidies being the deciding factor. Concerning farming I'd say we`ve arrived at the opposite of the free market, we've got state controlled farming via the subsidies. In that sense I'd agree farmers are not capitalist, as there is no free market.
No matter what, “Home Equity Loan” is something many farmers are familiar with, along with the cost of a combine.
Great thought provoking video! I do agree that land-owned farmers business should be distinguished from more extractive, monopolistic, and financialised business systems involved in the equity market. However, The land-owned farmers activities are capitalist, as they follow these activities:
1. For profit entrepreneurship
2. Private ownership of the means of production
3. Market exchange as means of allocation
4. Wage labour
The main difference is that they are getting ripped off by a dysfunctional market, as well as the natural limitations of profit making that you mentioned.
Socialist sectors in uk include public-owned parts of nhs and education system.
There are a few other main actors in food. The consumers don't really have the power to not eat food, but they can slide sideways into cheaper brands and they retain the power to vote. "People who eat food" is probably a pretty large electoral block.
Distributors are both chains and wholesale traders. Sometimes they have both roles, a wholesale trader can own a chain. Food gots to reach people. This can include some competition or a trust. The fewer they are, the more pressure they exert. They are in turn more or less pressured by consumers.
Industry processing is closer to industrial production. There is room to abruptly change suppliers, to evaluate competing ones. Sometimes the industry is independent, sometimes owned cooperatively. How much processing varies. There is a negotiation with distributors on a market.
@4:08: he is talking about risk and uncertainty which is agronomy 101.
Id be keen to see what you make of the Australia meat deal along with Jerermy Clarksons new pub. Personally I think favour of union between Pubs and Farms within the UK ecconomy could be a viable long term solution.
Hi, farmworker here! I appreciate and subscribe to this channel :) Around 8:45 you seem to imply that methane is not a form of carbon in the atmosphere, which it most certainly is. Furthermore, the result of methane decay is just more atmospheric CO2--as I am sure you are aware, so the idea that this somehow separates agriculture from other industries seems off to me. I think you make a much better point with the comment that agriculture is situated within the carbon cycle. Aside from the fossil fuels burned by farm vehicles and embodied emissions in farming inputs, the rest of the movement of carbon that happens in agriculture follows natural processes of primary growth and metabolism that are all part of the natural carbon cycle.
Actually not. Methane (CH4) contributes with the production of ozone (O3) on atmospherci sublevels. Its 20x more aggressive than carbon dioxide (CO2) but lasts 12 years instead of 150 of CO2. If you dont have enought trees your cattle operation is not carbon negative (as you implied as "natural carbon cycle). Study about it
@@guihoffmannctba you seem
to have completely misunderstood my comment. Perhaps you should “study about it!”
Grasslands also participate in the carbon cycle, not just trees.@@guihoffmannctba
I would somewhat agree if you follow traditional agricultural models the way it's taught at colleges. There's been many agricultural innovations in the last 40-50 years where many of these issues are minimized. Even the issues tenant farmers face can be mitigated by using things like movable infrastructure. I'd suggest looking at some of the work done by Joel Salatin, Mark Sheppard, Richard Perkins and Darren Doherty. Personally I think the key to the success of farming is not more specialization in farming but more generalization. Joel Salatin has a great talk he gave about fiefdoms, which is available on youtube. I highly recommend watching that as a starting point.
Your video is incredibly cogent, well-researched, and well-produced, and your arguments are fascinating. Have you ever read G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc's arguments for Distributivism (pursuing a large Yeoman class as a policy objective)? Would you be interested in doing a podcast episode on our channel talking about the economics of farming, cash-crop vs subsistence farming, the mixed upsides and downsides of the green revolution, and related topics?
Are futures contracts not a thing in the UK? The whole point of them is to hedge against the market risk of future crop prices
As usual you open up another overlooked chapter in farming history to very illuminating effect. Fascinating about Orwin and you explain beautifully what an unusual market chain farmers are located in. But I disagree with you about capitalism. As the post-War Marxist historians argued (Hill, Hobsbawm et al) capitalism first developed in English farming. Aristo land owners became rentiers, while their tenants were small scale capitalists who hired labour (former serfs) to work the land, even if they usually mucked in too. Crucially, and this is what defined farmers as capitaliists, they extracted surplus value from their workers. Today, as you say, many farms are worked solely by family members because of the development of ag. tech. But they remain small capitalists - even the 14% of farms which are still tenanted require expensive equipment. Strikes me that British farmers are classic petiit-bourgeois, squeezed by big capital, monopsony, nature, the vagaries of government policy ... .
You need to reexamine your understanding of capitalism.
It is the investment of “capital” in order to increase income and build wealth . Every small businessman (petit bourgeois ) and owner-operator is, in fact, a Capitalist. Employing others who are paid a wage is NOT the criteria.
Also, employing people is not “extracting surplus value”. It is a recognition that the employee does not create the whole value of the product. The person or persons who provide the raw material, the premises, the means (tools and machinery) and market the product also contribute to the value.
Wages and profit are simply how the value of the product are apportioned.
My view of capitalism would be closer to the idea of democracy . In any workplace there is no democracy. Sure, unionisation. However those that make all the decisions on what happens with the capital, what is produced, what people are paid etc is usually at the whim of a small number of high paid board members or a small number of share holders with votes. The workers who build said company have no say if, after decades of service, that company decided to move to the third world in seek of greater profits, devastating said community, leaving them with largely no means (machinery, tools, infrastructure, capital) to seek some other form of production and livelyhood for their community
Any sensible country would have laws in place that either allow the majority and minority vote in a SME organisation and laws that allow the purchase of said company by the citizens, under loan, or some other subsidy.. however, countries often let their citizens be left the short end of the stick when these companies make decisions that negatively impact them. There is no democracy, there is no good from companies. They care about profits, their shareholders, not those that serve and sacrifice for them to become successful.
In short, the capitalism we have today is merely exploitation.
And you get a vote every four years for some shcmuck who's gonna finish his term 10x richer than when he started.
That's why most politicians, at least here in Australia, all go and work for large corporations and get paid the big bucks for all their hard work and knowledge at screwing over regular citizens
What a sought after skill that is haha
@@ValleysOfNeptune2150 A very false understanding…. one that despises wage-earners as having zero agency or understanding of their decisions.
Firstly, the employee has as as much right to leave the company, as the company has to sack him. In fact, he has more right. There are very few legal restrictions on withdrawing your labour, no matter what the implications are, the costs of replacing you and teaching someone else the skills that you have acquired and are taking with you.
Secondly, you very much DO have control over your wage. You exercise that control when you agree to take the hobby, and you exercise it every time you continue to sign on instead of going elsewhere to find a job with a higher wage - if you can convince someone else that you are worth it.
Thirdly, if the company goes bust, those who own it lose the results of year’s of effort, maybe a lifetime’s. Your loss is limited to the costs of finding other employment.
Fourthly….. what on earth gives you the idea that ever floor-sweeper should have as much input into managing the company, as those who built it from the ground up?
If you want to run a business, go start your own. That is what Liberty is…. not demanding a say in something that somebody else built. Just be aware that if you DO work for yourself, you will work longer hours with no overtime rates and no holiday pay. You will rapidly find that the “Boss” who looks back at you from the mirror, is a bigger slave-driver than any foreman you’ve ever met.
@@peterwebb8732 well aware mate - was once like you..
I'm not talking about small business owners
I hear your point , your free to fuck off elsewhere, I know the sentiment well
Same goes for plenty of people moving countries, out of oppressive regimes, they go elsewhere - it's a thing as old as human civilisation and common as air
That's not my point at all
My point is closer with the idea that large multinational companies aren't held accountable for the economic damage they do in societies
Case in point: in Australia over the last 25 years our manufacturing and industry has been decimated - companies take all their profits and just ship to other countries, leaving a long strew of damage in communities , environmental damage , and completely divesting in our youth education etc
Our governments do nothing to prevent the harm done which far exceeds their costs
Now, we must rebuild an entire sector with taxpayer money - over 300 billion of it I might add
It's a vicious cycle.
If people had a say in what a branch of a company did in its local community
These economic and environmental damages just would happen, rarely, if at all..
Sure the small business owner should be able to do what he wants, I was one myself
But when it came to expanding, my only motive was profit, not training, not helping my community - so yes I would be looking in the mirror at the slave driver - but is that what we really want? Is what I began to ask myself.. money is great
But long term prosperity, independence, and sovereignty for my countrymen,
My children, and the benefit of my community
And that should be the goal of everyone and every government
Not to let some big company come in, harvest our minerals, work out people and then leave when they can make more without consequence, only an insane person would allow that
I agree, people have the choice everyday, but oh how they sell themselves short for a quick buck in the short term
There are no victims only volunteers, the sad truth.
Forestry is a little similar. The trees you grow now won't be ready right off. But the trees the last generation planted will be.
An economic barrier to entry, seems like it should be a thing of the past due to pushes in Urban Farming over the past 20 years or so. You don't really need land to start a farm as much as you need to know how to grow plants indoors. The thing about farming as a whole is that it can range from people looking to have a more sustainable source of food to industrialists who are looking to optimize production in order to reach larger markets. A student growing their vegetables hydroponically in their center city apartment to have their own supply of vegetables while supplementing their income by selling produce at the summer farmer's market is as much of a farmer as someone growing 6 acres of garlic in a rural landscape.
I think overall, farming sees itself as something different from industry, which allows for it to fight for legislation to treat it differently which sort of allows it to be stuck in it's own conservatism.
I love these topics. Subscribed from India.
I do enjoy having my beliefs challenged in good faith. I always had a dim opinion of farmers. Thinking of them as capitalists who own a mean of production. This video explains this is not the case. You have done your demographic a service.
Here in New Zealand we call dry stock farms: ‘large lifestyle blocks’. And we call small lifestyle blocks: ‘Life Sentence Blocks’.
The poor return on investment here is crazy.
The dairy farmers here are more capitalist in the way they think, but even they don’t make much money now. It’s a miserable industry at the moment.
The fundamental problem with capitalism is that it considers land as capital. Land is not capital; land is the SOURCE of all capital. In other words, it is the source for ALL resources. And since each human has a right to life in our systems; we all also have an implicit right to the resources needed to sustain our life. Those resources must either be provided without cost to the people who have been denied access to land thru land deed schemes, or they must be allowed to live on the land and gain their own subsistence without obligation to ANY landlord.
This principle is demonstrated in prisons where people have been denied the right to obtain their own resources, therefore necessary resources are provided to them… and demands that they work to attain those resources would be considered a forced labor encampment.
Common Law had no provisions for remote land ownership. You had to occupy the land to “own” it. This makes logical sense when it comes to adequate resource allocation for everyone on the planet. The planet is the common inheritance of all who abide on the planet; that is why land “ownership” is a work of fiction that exists only on paper, backed up by the guns of the lazy and powerful. ✌🏼
Interesting argument, thanks for sharing!
Capitalism doesnt consider anything its just loosly defined economic system not ideology.
I believe you might like Georgism, if you don't already. Its a quite niche idea that the land should be owned in common via 100% land tax (not property tax, just taxing the value of the land itself not the buildings/farms/assets on the land).
A very interesting group of videos .Thanks for sharing.
I enjoy your videos, thank you.
I think of restaurants as socialist, because the people club their money together to afford what they could not afford alone, and they benefit themselves as a community by doing so.
Of course people will say that I am wrong, but that is a given.
Capitalism means private ownership of the means of production. Farming also qualifies to that.
Yes, but to be a capitalist you need to live off the work of your employes. Small farmers often own the means of production (land, machines) but still have to work themselves there, they are usually petit burgeoise, therefore neither proletarian nor capitalist.
@@FemFridge Do petit bourgeois count as bourgeois or as a seperate group? But I guess this may be debated
I recommend you to read about he works of Alexasander Chayanov; despite being an fervorous soviet, his views in the peasantry are very interesting
Growing food in our own yards (including raising chickens) should become more common. All other farms should be cooperatively or socially owned.
By defintion they are Capitalists, they are owners who employ a workforce and their assets are tied up in very large fixed assets...
Great video, but you need some Chris Smaje on that bookshelf!
If farming wasn't feasible why do farmers remain in agriculture?
If farming wasn't feasible why do manufacturers make equipment for farmers?
If farmering wasn't feasible why don't farmers sell up?
Farmers have had a BOOM since the end of WW2 and their LAND and the FARMSTEAD has seen a HUGE increase in values, it is the hidden wealth/gold mine that farmers don't crow about when farms do come up for sale. If in my business I bought an industrial unit for £20,000 in 1960, today it would probably be worth £750,000 to £1,5MIllion subject to condition, yard area, access and other key features. Also, farmers escape a lot of tax, one of them being they can run on rebated diesel (red diesel) unlike the construction industry which has to suffer the use of white diesel in plant machinery. Farmers are feather bedded where other industries are ignored!
Here in NZ we call it asset rich cash poor. But some come unstuck because there’s not enough cashflow to pay the expenses. They have to carve off a small piece and sell it to keep the wolf from the door.
This is why Georgism splits Capital and Land. Farmers often want to do something not very productive with their land (growing crops), rather than doing the most productive thing (building houses). The government supports this through subsidies. At least that's how it is in Maryland, USA; where land prices are very high, but we still have farmers tying up land that could be used for infrastructure. A Land Tax helps to put the least sensible farms out of business, which could go to support other farm stabilization policies.
Because farming has become corporatised. Large companies with big cash reserves are able to pay for the best stuff outright.
Farming really sucks as a job. It’s a vocation. Long hours, hard labour, and the return on that just isn’t worth it when expenses are taken into account.
People go into it because they’re from a rural community and their family did it. It’s very rare that someone from the city would go to a farm to make a living and actually make it long term.
Due to inflation £60k in 1960 is £1.2M in 2024. Right in the middle of your valuation estimate.
That land didn't increase in value, the currency the land is valued in just decreased in value.
And I'll believe that price when it is actually sold and minus all the fees and taxes.
Subsidies, Jon. He explains it in the video even. How can your construct such a long comment and not have watched thoroughly?
Now you mentioned lower labour costs-yes, but to buy the machines you need a lot of money so you need to pay off you debt. So in the past you were regularly paying wages, now you are are paying off credits. No matter good or bad year, season or not
Brilliant video - subscribed for sure and can't wait for the next one
Panoramic overview! So much information to think about. Thank you.
I enjoy learning about farming from you, thank you. :)
First video I watch from your channel. This is great, thank you for the content and info, keep it going!
He wanted to be a farmer but didn't have a farm is a story of my life.
food is most oppressed in retail pricing and farmland is overpriced because of building potential . food for a dollar but iphones for a thousand dollars .
just found your channel. interesting stuff.
This analysis is so mistaken, albeit that maybe there’s a Wittgenstinian point about the use of the word “capitalist”.
Farmers are paradigm capitalists. They have to take the resources (capital) available to them - the land they own or rent, their livestock and machinery, and their financial resources, whether retained profit or bank facility, to produce crops and/or animal products. They have to buy seed, animal feed, fertilizer, fuel and services such as veterinary help or servicing of machinery and ensure that they can sell for as good a price as possible to recover the annual costs, the cost of servicing their capital (rent and interest), any labour costs and ensure that they have made enough to live off and provide capital for the next year’s cycle (although the cycle may be less than a year in some specialist or quasi-industrial operations, such as chicken hatcheries). This is capitalism in one of its purest forms.
Farmers are not the only capitalists at risk from the weather. Ask any proprietor of any tourist or leisure-based business. The land is not an inexhaustible resource. Its value lies in its fertility, and there are countless examples from history where it has been lost - our Brecklands, those parts of central China whose eroded soils became the loess deposits elsewhere, the abused chernozems of Ukraine in the Soviet era. Have you ever seen a Fenland blow?
They are also not the only capitalists at risk from the “market” - every business supplying products or services in a market economy (most being regulated for good political reasons - whether this works well is another question) is at risk from changes in the buying habits of their customers. In my lifetime even the “learned professions” have discovered this to be the case. I come from a farming family, but like my brothers decided that getting up at 3 am to deal with a difficult calving was not for me, so went to university, qualified as a solicitor and entered private practice, being a partner (i.e. capitalist entrepreneur selling professional services) for 33 years. OK, there may have not been any early mornings struggling to get a calf out of a distressed cow, but it was just as stressful and uncertain as running the family dairy farm.
Orwin seems to be under the impression that only large joint stock companies are capitalists and that they are somehow immune to these pressures. This now looks incredibly naïve. Remember British Leyland, GEC, Woolworths, ICI, Pan-Am, and many other examples of large capitalist enterprises, once seen as invincible giants of their national economies that have failed due to competition and failing to provide products and services that the customers wanted.
It is also untrue that farmers cannot change what they do to respond to changing markets. The mostly annual cycle of most farms is much shorter than the product development cycle of most manufacturing businesses. Orwin should have read his contemporary A G Street’s Farmer’s Glory to see how farmers had to be (and were) flexible in their farming activities in the 1930s to respond to changing market and governmental policy conditions.
The land ownership position is also not as set out. Not owning the land you farm does not prevent you being a capitalist - you simply have rent as a capital cost. While the price of land has increased in the last 50 years various investors have acquired agricultural land as a long-term investment, it fell during the inter-war period and in the prolonged agricultural depression of the late 19th century that lasted until the First World War. And as to labour, agriculture is in exactly the same position as any other business enterprise, except that the flight from the land has been enormous, driven by low pay, working conditions that are unattractive to most and mechanisation removing much of the need for large numbers of unskilled workers, except in those sectors (like vegetable growing) where the need tends to be seasonal and unable to support full-time employment.
Finally, as to the bars to entry, this is something that is not unique to farming. In the service sector, you are likely to have to invest heavily in IT. The general high cost of property affects anyone who needs premises for their proposed business. Any machinery you need will be sophisticated, computer-controlled and is likely to be expensive with limited sources of supply
Farmers live in the same changing world as the rest of us. They are possibly even more subject to the whims of government policy than some, but as a retired deputy money laundering officer in one of my firms, I am not certain that the Rural Payments Agency is any worse (slower perhaps!) than any governmental organisation you have to dela with, in the UK or elsewhere.
Nonetheless, I am interested in this, so will subscribe!
BTW - I recommend reading Clifford Selly’s Ill Fares the Land if you can find a copy for an insight as to where we were in the early 1970s and what were then seen as the challenges for farming in Britain.
Fucking hell, if anything isn't capitalist it's joint stock companies, capital means private property and publicly traded corporations are PUBLIC (from the Latin publica, meaning 'common' aka *shared.)* property.
By the Marxist definition, only the biggest farmers (those who are so big that they do not work their farms themselves, but have employees for all the practical work) can be called capitalists. Those who own their land but have to work on it themselves, would rather be petite bourgeoisie.
Funny analysis, you didn’t refute anything from the video though
(Much talk, little meaning)
Yeah, in order to say that farmers aren't not capitalist, you basically have to say no one is.
Quick fact check: when methane oxidises in the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to produce 2.75 times its mass in carbon dioxide. The carbon doesn't magically disappear. That's on top of the fact that in the time before it decays, it's a very significantly more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So - is it really possible for intensive farming (as in, intensive enough to feed everyone without lots more deforestation) to be non extractive? - Not convinced!
Unrelatedly, I always had the impression that the classification of farming as capitalist in the popular imagination, refers specifically to the idea that lots of farms these days have landlords that are "big ag" companies who like short term returns and who pressure farmers into using unsustainable techniques to increase yield and extract dividends at the expense of the land. I always thought that this idea was being deliberately contrasted with smaller farmers who own their own land and have a long term interest in it.
Barter is the only free market.
Land Owners. Capitalists. Labor.
-Georgism
Roofers can't work in bad weather and strong winds.
There is a bunch of people I class as seasonal labour. They are labourers but for one reason or another they are not working year round. Oil riggers wouldn't stand living a whole year on a platform, tourist season is a few months, crops are harvested at set periods or not at all. In practice you need to either make enough in those periods to afford going idle a few weeks or months, or have a second job.
Again i'd like to object to the use of the political terminology here. A socialist is someone with socialist political leanings, independent of their occupation and class, while a proletarian/worker is someone who sells their labour in exchange for a wage. A bourgeois/capitalist is someone who owns capital, which includes farmers though as explained in the video they have different needs and modes of managing their business compared to an industrialist with a monocle and top hat. If anything, from what you described a farmer resembles an artisan the most, who's both the owner of the tools for his labour and the one doing the actual work
A socialist is also a worker owning the means of production. There is nothing wrong in saying that. As per definition of the „inventor“ of socialism. Don’t confuse someone of the ideology with what the ideology contains, even when it is described by the same term. This comment to me comes off as another disappointing example of capitalist realism.
@@kkon5ti ive never heard anyone saying "socialist" to mean anything but someone who supports socialism
Interestingly, the futures and commodities markets are developed out of the uncertainty of farming before capitalism became a concept...which points to their inherent capitalist nature...
You are correct in categorizong the small farmer a true socialist. Socialism is where the worker owns the means of production, and a small independent farmer is exactly that. Ditto for "mom and pop" small businesses. Having the state own the business or farm "on behalf of the people" is Communism, not socialism.
One thing you overlooked in your video is the impact of hyper regulation, especially in this era where those making the regulations are utterly disconnected from those they are regulating.
It just depends on whether you own the land you work or part of it.
Alot of rich people in the UK hold land as a way to avoid tax, if it's big enough to be a farm they pay someone else to work it, the rich hold the land, the asset, the capital.
The problem i see is the farmer can't set the price of his own product. that's not free market capitalism. A farmer should be able to sell to who he wants and negotiate a price. Instead the commodities people found a way to legally dictate a price where the farmer has no say...
There are those other "Land Banks" owned by property developers, who drive up the price of land. A Land Tax is the only way to stop land hoarding.
Hence, government subsidies. Powering the large number of cookbooks and TV how tos and fashionable spots about the trendy eateries. Almost a charity, in many ways, and not a series of accidents as subsidies are involved, in the form of contracts. Many historical equivalents. Liked the ones about why many in the Old World left because of the oppressive landowners or royalty as they were often seen to be oppressive (serfs or the equivalent) to come to the New World to become landowners themselves in the pattern which they had alleged to be fleeing. The most recent example of this is when, during the US Civil War, Lincoln started the Homestead Act that gave free of charge, certain amounts of land, often previously occupied by the original locals, it they improved cited land in an agricultural way. Lincoln did this as he had thought that the referenced War was going to last a while, and he had wanted a way to feed the North's troops.
All the economic problems with farming are simply related to the cost of acquiring the land. If it was really so hard, then land would be as cheap as chips.
Planting durians can make you a multi millionaire.
Was never into framing, but somehow got this video recommended. Know nothing about C.S. Orwin except fo what you told in this video, but can tell you that Russian communist had imposed state ownership of the land and the crops in their own nation and in nations the conquered (like my own, Ukrainian nation) and that resulted in artificial famines, like Holodomor, which were in turn deliberately exacerbated by Russians as a means of quelling any resistance in other non-Russian nations which lived under the occupation of Russian Soviet regime. Which is why Ukrainians view it not only as a disastrous economic measure, but also as a gemocide (becauuse all the artificial famines of the 30-s were somehow harder on non-Russian nations).
That said, it is still a dubious economic policy which might seem attractive only because Britain haven't tried it on a national scale. At it's core is a substitution of mutch land owners with just one - the state. But how well could it work, concidering that the state is not the farmer and just another landowner who is much more incline to impose measures (rather than negotiate) than any private land owner.
Do you know something about "Distributivism"? By Chesterton and Biloc?
agrarian capitalism is very different than financialized capitalism. productive land has inherent value, and if there's a bank willing to lend on that value, thar blurs the lines between those two.
Very good. Just a homegardener here.
The video is informative and sheds light on the economics of farming. You however didn't tell us how Farmers are not Capitalists, or rather you should have started by defining your understanding of capitalism
There is also the fact farmers have for some time relied on Socialism in the form of farm subsidies for their security.
Farm subsidies are not for the benefit of farmers. It benefits the food industry.
If you own the means of production and sell your goods on a market -> You are by Definition a Capitalist. Now, not every "Farmer" owns his own means of production, there are Farmers who only have rented the means of production from a owner. They don't really own the Farm yet manage it. There its like CEO and sahreholder.
Either way you work on a market and you produce things to sell them on it. This means all capitalist pressures and Laws apply to you just like any other industry.
I think you are misunderstanding capitalism. Simply having a free market does not make something capitalist. It is all about who profits the most from the labor, the workers who do the work or the person who put up the capital. The market does not make any difference there are just as many if not more forms of socialism that allow for a free market as there are capitalist systems that have no market be it state controlled economies or monopolies.
But you are somewhat right poultry and pig farming as well as dairy are often capitalist enterprises in the factory farm system but at the same time most of those factory farms are not selling on the open market.
@@FakeSchrodingersCatYou are incorrect.
Capitalism is the investment of Capital, in order to increase income and build wealth. A sole-operator who employs nobody is a capitalist. A small-businessman who rents his premises is still a Capitalist… both have invested their own money - be it in land, livestock, machinery, tools or trading-stock - in order to increase their wealth.
Renting farmers are no different, as you would know if you’d ever gone through the exercise of stocking a farm, buying machinery and sowing a crop. You spend the money FIRST and (hopefully) make a profit LATER.
That is how Capitalism works. The people you envy just do it on a larger scale.
@@peterwebb8732 there are cases where Farmers hardly can live from their income and are in debt. They don‘t own anything and could with enough oversight paranoia die on hunger while working on the basic food system. I would classify them as a modified form of lumpenproletariat. They produce food yet can‘t live from the food they create cause they have to sell it immediately to cover their debts and would get punished for stealing their own produce cause, for example, the chickens they produce are technically not their property from egg to slaughter. They are by all metrics merely workers and nothing more. Farmers who own are all capitalists.
@@peterwebb8732 So all socialism is capitalist. Again you don't understand capitalism it is about ownership. Socialists setting up a business also require investment the difference is that investment does not automatically convey ownership.
That's what the Stalinists thought of the Ukrainian peasant during the Holodomor.
Agriculture still relies on seasonal labour, in usa mexican illigal labour and in europe eastern europeans, eith al the labourlaws being ignored for that time of year
I had no idea farmers could rent farmland. I thought you had to own it. Even the farmers have landlords! 😢 Also seeing the price of those tractors gave me the sweats! Crazy expensive
In case anyone missed it, he works for Monsanto.
Why do I have a feeling you're antisemitic
@@Rockzilla1122 I have literally no idea, but I would genuinely like to know the connection between my comment and antisemitism
You are no taking into consideration, that a modern society provision is made, to the support farmers with subsidies. Thus ironing-out the worst wrinkles. Also the structure of UK farming is still feudal and can't be use as a general standard.
In a circular economy no resource is truly exhaustible, except for the energy provided by the sun technically.
Farming the way it has been practiced by the European tradition, going back to the pre indo European peoples, is inherently using up the soil. We do not return human refuse to the land so there will always be a drift of certain nutrients away from the plot they are harvested from. Also the low amount of soil cover is a huge contributor to continuous soil erosion. Yes croprotation, fertilizer and animal excrement do prolong the half-life of our soils, but we never fully close the cycle.
With our horrendous addiction to synthetic/ mineral based fertilizers we have made a huge showing of that with the modern day phenomenon of regular devastating algae blooms.
A future prove farmer has an endless amount of problems and as human habitation goes on, fewer and fewer solutions.
In Europe at least, the most sustainable models are almost entirely free market supported, granted they have a comparatively small customer base that has disproportionate wealth, but the conventional agricultural model is almost entirely subsidy dependent.
What about futures markets?
You need to start with defining your terms. You claim farming doesn't work in a free market and then go on to describe all the laws and government regulations that made it not a free market in farming.
Landlords , climate and all variables organizing crops , as well as fix constraints that can't adapt rapidly to the market are not linked to government
@@fanofcoddNo no no. It's well known the government controls the weather.
yeah the title and conclusion is a stretch just to spark some chat. it seems like a lot of people are calculated in what and how they post, with the aim to receive more comments.
Free markets don't exist, and never have.
@@tombrown407 The Republic of Cospaia pretty much was one, although that was more or less by accident.
Great video Oli, keep up the good work!
Interesting analysis
By definition, if you are producing more product than you need to feed your family in order to sell it, you are working under capitalist thinking. This would only apply to a homesteader who farms to feed their family, and trade to fill the gaps of what they don’t produce.
You are conflating markets and capitalism.
Capitalism describes the organization around the system of production (e.g. privately owned production & wage labor).
Markets describe the exchange of goods and services.
You can have markets without capitalism!
@@johnkekse Free markets are the only aspect of capitalism that people actually agree is an attribute of capitalism.
@@howardroark3736 the person i replied to said that it is capitalist behaviour to make money from trading goods and services. Also implying that producing surplus is a capitalist endeavour.
I just wanted to clarify that simply 'making money' or 'turning a profit' is not reserved for capitalism. We have documentation of surplus production way before capitalism. Also, following market principles is not sufficient grounds to describe a system of production as capitalist behaviour.
I did not say capitalism has no (free) markets. I simply said markets can exist outside of capitalism. Which in return does not mean that markets dont exist in capitalism. Markets exist in various (political &) economic systems, not just capitalism. Do you think the forum romanum (e.g. in 200 BC) where goods are exchanged for a price is an example of capitalism in action?
Aspects people actually agree that capitalism is predicated on is 'private property' and 'for profit operation' thereof. Please look up the definitions for capitalism and market economy.
Markets =/= capitalism, that's insane. People have been selling excess crop/product since the literal dawn of civilization.
Sure they are exercising "capitalist thinking" in the sense that they engage in capitalism in terms of selling for profit. But they dont really mainly generate capital to be gained and reinvested - they generate revenue at their own workplace to create comfort of their own. They are specifically small business owners / petty bourgeois, not capitalists.