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An interesting answer to "how will we get insulin and/or bananas in an anarchy?" (when-if.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/anarchism@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Sorry, but you seem to fail to understand the argument, both me and the article make regarding the "social / organizational side": There is no technical reason why an "anarchist community" couldn't produce insulin in sufficient quantities and everything else can't be known at this point in time and is moot to speculate about.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Ok, let's clarify.

    We both agree that the technical aspect is not an issue. So let's drop that point.

    The question that usually comes up is, how might the community / organisation be structured in such a way that complex and critical goods can be reliably manufactured?

    I'm interested in theories and proposals, methods by which this could believably be implemented. Nothing will happen without at least a proposal or blueprint to base discussion or action upon. Proposing to tear down the current system without a single idea of how we would replace critical functions is utter foolishness.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    But that's entirely the point... there are millions of ideas and ideas are cheap and usually impractical to implement anyway. The only people that will come up with practical solutions how to produce insulin are the workers in a future existing insulin factory that find themselves in a society transitioning to more equitable and anarchist inspired ideals. And they will figure it out somehow as there is no technical barrier and they clearly have a product in high demand for which the people around them also easily understand why it is needed.

    One of the big reasons why Marxist socialists and the more anarchist leaning ones (usually the ones with practical experience from labour unions) split up more than hundred years ago, was because the Marxists continued to come up with all these harebrained theories and proposals for the future and then used these ideas to justify doing bad things in the here and now. Anarchists always clearly said that this is a sure way to end up in a dystopia, as the end can never justify the means and I think the history of the USSR and similar states clearly proved them right on that point.

    The anarchist idea is to ensure the means and methods you employ to reach your imagined more equitable future society are a mirror of what you want to eventually achieve. And this clearly works as there are right now worker owned and controlled cooperatives with complex supply chains, building complex technical equipment all based on anarchist principles with annual turnovers of tens of billions of dollars. Such a cooperative could also easily produce insulin or other pharmaceuticals and would clearly have the needed resources to solve eventual supply chain issues.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    First of all, the core problem is the prevalence of diabetes and the need for remedy, and if so in a community we should speak in numbers if we were to entertain Marxian curiosity of ideological line and political program. If in my community there are 3 of us I can't hardly think it is a communal problem to mass produce a remedy for the three of us. Maybe we should move somewhere where a remedy exists, before we run out of insulin that is.

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