Purpose for Self-sufficiency

LOGIC for Weapons & Self Sufficiency

Quoted from THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY by Bertrand Russell

"What has science done to increase population? 

n the first place, by machinery, fertilizers, and improved breeds it has increased the yield per acre and the yield per man-hour of labor. This is a direct effect. But there is another which is perhaps more important, at least for the moment. By improvement in means of transport it has become possible for one region to produce an excess of food while another produces an excess of industrial products or raw materials. This makes it possible — as for instance in our own country — for a region to contain a larger population than its own food resources could support. Assuming free mobility of persons and goods, it is only necessary that the whole world should produce enough food for the population of the whole world, provided the regions of deficient food production have some- thing to offer which the regions of surplus food production are willing to accept in exchange for food. But this condition is apt to fail in bad times. 

In Russia, after the First World War, the peasants had just about the amount of food they wanted for themselves, and would not willingly part with any of it for the purchase of urban products. At that time, and again during the famine in the early thirties, the urban population was kept alive only by the energetic use of armed force. In the famine, as a result of government action, millions of peasants died of starvation; if the government had been neutral the town-dwellers would have died.

Such considerations point to a conclusion which, it seems to me, is too often ignored. Industry, except in so far as it ministers directly to the needs of agriculture, is a luxury:

in bad times its products will be unsalable, and only force directed against food-producers can keep industrial workers alive, and that only if very many food-producers are left to die. If bad times become common, it must be inferred that industry will dwindle and that the industrialization characteristic of the last 150 years will be rudely checked."

― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“The all-pervading disease of the modern world is the total imbalance between city and countryside, an imbalance in terms of wealth, power, culture, attraction and hope. The former has become over-extended and the latter has atrophied. The city has become the universal magnet, while rural life has lost its savour. Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place in the countryside. The prevailing lack of balance, based on the age-old exploitation of countryman and raw material producer, today threatens all countries throughout the world, the rich even more than the poor. To restore a proper balance between city and rural life is perhaps the greatest task in front of modern man.”

―  Pëtr Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops

Who does not remember the remarkable chapter by which Adam Smith opens his inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations? Even those of our contemporary economists who seldom revert to the works of the father of political economy, and often forget the ideas which inspired them, know that chapter almost by heart, so often has it been copied and recopied since. It has become an article of faith; and the economical history of the century which has elapsed since Adam Smith wrote has been, so to speak, an actual commentary upon it

" Division of labour" was its watchword. And the division and subdivision—the permanent subdivision —of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India. We have, first, the broad division into producers and consumers: little-consuming producers on the one hand, little-producing consumers on the other hand. Then, amidst the former, a series of further subdivisions; the manual worker and the intellectual worker, sharply separated from one another to the detriment of both; the agricultural labourers and the workers in the manufacture; and, amidst the mass of the latter, numberless sub-divisions again—so minute, indeed, that the modern ideal of a workman seems to be a man or a woman, or even a girl or a boy, without the knowledge of any handicraft, without any conception whatever of the industry he or she is employed in, who is only capable of making all day long and for a whole life the same infinitesimal part of something: who from the age of thirteen to that of sixty pushes the coal cart at a given spot of the mine or makes the spring of a penknife or " the eighteenth part of a pin" Mere servants to some machine of a given description ; mere flesh-and-bone parts of some immense machinery; having no idea how and why the machinery performs its rhythmical movements

Case Studies references:

Don't Survive the "Collapse" - Prevent It : 

the people of the city of Havana began tearing up empty lots, reclaiming abandoned buildings, and planting "urban gardens." Neither "communist" nor "capitalist," the spurt of survival-driven local enterprise brought a people teetering on the edge of starvation back to a degree of stability.