this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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What if I want to make my own farm?
You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you'd have to obtain a lot of land. Then you'd have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you'd have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don't produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Personal property is for personal use. That's it.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn't want a garden won't have one to sell you, because they wouldn't have one in the first place.
Don't think in terms of "right" and "wrong". Think materially.
what if their father left them the garden and they want to sell it to me? what if they want to move somewhere else and they decide to sell me their property?
Who decides what constitutes surplus?
Substance farming is different than owning a farm that exists by its own production of food and selling those produced goods at market price.
Remove "some" and redefine "friends" to mean "anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and for any reason", and you're golden.
That's a paddlin'
I don't think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that's literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
That requires owning land yourself, which strictly speaking isn't a thing in communism.