- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/34610234
People always tend to forget just how incredibly, massive our planet is.
Or just how much we are now capable of producing with industrialization.
The opening passage to Kropotkin’s “Conquest of Bread”
During the long succession of agitated ages which have elapsed since, mankind has nevertheless amassed untold treasures. It has cleared the land, dried the marshes, hewn down forests, made roads, pierced mountains; it has been building, inventing, observing, reasoning; it has created a complex machinery, wrested her secrets from Nature, and finally it pressed steam and electricity into its service. And the result is, that now the child of the civilized man finds at its birth, ready for its use, an immense capital accumulated by those who have gone before him. And this capital enables man to acquire, merely by his own labour combined with the labour of others, riches surpassing the dreams of the fairy tales of the Thousand and One Nights. / The soil is cleared to a great extent, fit for the reception of the best seeds, ready to give a rich return for the skill and labour spent upon it—a return more than sufficient for all the wants of humanity. The methods of rational cultivation are known. On the wide prairies of America each hundred men, with the aid of powerful machinery, can produce in a few months enough wheat to maintain ten thousand people for a whole year. And where man wishes to double his produce, to treble it, to multiply it a hundred-fold, he makes the soil, gives to each plant the requisite care, and thus obtains enormous returns. While the hunter of old had to scour fifty or sixty square miles to find food for his family, the civilized man supports his household, with far less pains, and far more certainty, on a thousandth part of that space. Climate is no longer an obstacle. When the sun fails, man replaces it by artificial heat; and we see the coming of a time when artificial light also will be used to stimulate vegetation. Meanwhile, by the use of glass and hot water pipes, man renders a given space ten and fifty times more productive than it was in its natural state.
So? Where are the other 70 % going? The rich can have all the numbers on their bank account they want, that is not where 70 % of all resources end up.
~30% goes directly to the rich as individuals. Probably a good 5% goes to wastage on defense, on Eisenhower noted.
Another significant percentage goes to corporations which then reroute that money in official and unofficial benefits as befits the owners of private fiefdoms that are, nonetheless, not directly counted in the net worth of rich individuals.
Feeding cows (chicken, pigs) for meat, stock piling, luxery goods, wastage, un-neccesarily complex structures, and your mum