>>7371Your attitude is still capitalist, maybe subconsciously or something. This isn't just about permaculture, but the general ethos of building support networks and organizing people vs selling them shit.
>the reason to look at this as just another production method is to be able get an objective view on whether it's worth doing.Given that it's a less labor intensive alternative and makes use of space that's largely being wasted, yes it is. Technology isn't just about building machines. It's also about finding better methods of doing things. Porky likes to treat technology as if it's just machines because machines are easy to commodify (but you also have intellectual property for methods). You eliminate almost all of the transportation labor (since most food is eaten very close in time and space to where it's harvested) and most of the labor involved in farming (effectively re-creating the field every harvest). That alone would make it worth it as an alternative sector. Then you also have to consider the ecological impact of large scale agriculture, which is immense and severely damaging. The problem with framing it in terms of "just another production method" is that you're failing to question your assumptions about what criteria matter for production methods. And within the capitalist framework, concerns like ecology and the nature of technology get ignored. It's probably not enough to cover all food needs, and certainly isn't initially. But it can significantly improve the way food is produced while also organizing and empowering workers along the way.
>Also get off you high horse, what i suggest is way more accessible,Having a community-operated garden that you can just walk up and grab food from is much more accessible than having proles buy seed bricks individually. "Accessibility" is a neoliberal buzzword at this point. Having a commodity on demand is inferior to building the infrastructure for a more robust and permanent system that can meet your needs without you having to buy anything. It's the same song and dance with "accessible" health insurance.
>and it does not preclude people forming communities,No, but it reinforces the capitalist mode of production rather than undermining it, while also doing nothing to build communities. "it doesn't preclude it" isn't good enough. It does nothing to encourage it either, which in this context (comparison to permaculture) is a downside.
>it might even be more in line with socialismSelling a commodity is not more in line with socialism than organizing people to meet their own needs independent of capitalist production.
>because it doesn't depend on bourgeois legal contracts,There doesn't need to be any on-paper contracting to organize a community permaculture project, and you have this completely backward. Contracts far predate the bourgeoisie and are an important tool in codifying a relationship so that the parties involved can negotiate acceptable terms and avoid exploitation. When you
don't have a contract the terms are vague and it's difficult to judge whether they've been upheld and someone is getting a raw deal. It's also easier to exercise power to influence the outcome because it's harder for the aggrieved to even articulate the offense.
>and probably is less vulnerable to subversion that way.Have you never done any contract based work? If you don't have a contract it's much easier to exploit vulnerable people, because there's no set terms to adhere to. Contract work is rife with abuse
because of a
lack of official contracts. Spend two minutes looking for work as some kind of freelancer and you'll find people trying to trick you into accepting a job without a contract so they can stiff you.
>And you can get off you high horse, you proposed this to be a hobby for yuppies, which is life-stylism.Where did I do that? It's a simple matter of fact that it's materially
easier for wealthier people, as is almost anything. That doesn't mean it's "for them." If anything, your proposed commodity would be more likely to cater to people with disposable income than a community-managed project.
>If you don't do mass-production then you can't realistically have broad adoption of this,What are you basing this on? It sounds like you can only imagine a trend taking off in the form of a commodity. The activity of planning and planting doesn't require special equipment or resources, only some knowledge of how to optimize agriculture. See the point in the first paragraph about technology.
>You'll get a few coops doing a niche gardening service for wealthy people that are part of the permaculture club.This would certainly be easier to implement in capitalism, which is why it would be beneficial to build a model around organizing poor communities to do this for themselves.
>If you do it as a service it's going to be expensive because it's difficult to automate and that excludes proles from being the benefactor of this.You could also teach how to do it (as people do with capital P Permaculture) for free and provide assistance in the form of delivering the necessary materials and advising on the practice. In the long term, however, it would be better to set up sustained networks of production as:
<a way to help the poor communities get money (by helping them sell their surplus produce)
<a way of organizing the workers along socialist lines (collectively managing production)
<a form of dual power, reducing dependency on capitalist food production
This is a synergistic set of benefits that a commodity won't match, ever. Part of the problem with capitalism is that commodity production gives you commodity fetishism, i.e. turning the planning of production into an exercise in optimizing for "the market," which is the opposite of what a socialist should be trying to do.
>I'm not opposed to having this done by a cooperative, you could potentially have a coop producing the seed-bricks.Why are you fixated on commodifying the product? Organizing people is vastly preferable to reducing them to a consumer. If you create a business based on selling seed bricks, your incentive is to make seed bricks that have to be replaced as often as possible. That's the reason planned obsolescence exists. Selling seed bricks as a commodity is directly antagonistic to the goal of fostering independence from capitalism. If you organize cooperatively where you coordinate with the growers, this issue is bypassed because there's no longer a conflict between the buyer and seller. Their success and your success are related. You foster interdependence based on collaboration instead of competition. I'm not even explaining permaculture at this point. This is the difference between capitalism and socialism.
>Consider who captures the value add, it it's not the workers it's not really interesting project.It would be the workers. The community grows the food. They keep what they use. The rest they can send to be sold at a fresh market, and they get back whatever revenue that generates. They could rotate and have a different volunteer sell every week. They could organize it through a co-op network and deduct any expenses (gas, fees, etc) before getting the income. Whatever they decide. The part about paying off a loan to finance the initial setup phase isn't even uncommon for co-ops. Lots of them have an initial buy-in of some kind, either actually paying money or working long enough to pay off the cost of entry. This is not ideal, but it's often necessary to make the numbers work. The best thing would be to have existing members of the community voluntarily contribute a portion of the value to an """investment""" fund that would be used to waive entry costs for poor communities, since it would be in everybody's interests to grow the organization. Bonus points if you can exploit the tax system to give people a write-off for it, to encourage wealthier people to actually help poor people get a leg up for once. The capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with and so on.