>> Food gathered on communal lands is available to everyone. Once
>> someone claims and enforces ownership, resources previously available
>> are either limited or must be traded. It has a lot to do with the
>> pauperizing of the overall diet.
> Agriculture did that - since to be a successful farmer, one must be
> able to work the land and get the food from it.

That doesn't make any discernible sense. Who are these individual
farmers? - farming is almost always a collective enterprise, whether
by a neolithic village, extended family or a capitalist firm. The
number of farms where only one person works the land is a very small
proportion of the world total and always has been.

And in a capitalist society, the successful farmers are those who don't
farm at all but get others to do it for them. Ownership does not go
along with doing the work.

In fact I suspect that the entire production of those farms and
gardens worldwide where the owner is the only person doing the work
could just vanish and nobody would notice the difference.


> Attempts at group ownership by communist countries generally have
> led to starvation when there hadn't been before.

More often the other way round - see the comparison of India and China
at <http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm>

Ownership by banks or land management corporations is just as much
"group ownership" as ownership by the state or a self-managed
cooperative. The differences are whose interests ownership serves.

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On 2/18/04 5:24 AM, in article , "bogus address"
> wrote:

>>> Food gathered on communal lands is available to everyone. Once
>>> someone claims and enforces ownership, resources previously available
>>> are either limited or must be traded. It has a lot to do with the
>>> pauperizing of the overall diet.
>> Agriculture did that - since to be a successful farmer, one must be
>> able to work the land and get the food from it.
>
> That doesn't make any discernible sense. Who are these individual
> farmers? - farming is almost always a collective enterprise, whether
> by a neolithic village, extended family or a capitalist firm. The
> number of farms where only one person works the land is a very small
> proportion of the world total and always has been.

1 farmer might be 1 family. Happens all the time.