Will There Be Bananas Under Socialism?

nymag.com Will There Be Bananas Under Socialism?

The most important question facing the American left today.

Apparently this was an actual discourse going around.

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73 comments

Yes. Reminder to liberals and anarchists, socialism and international trade aren't mutually exclusive.
- I'm not entirely sure how to read your comment but anarchism and international trade aren't mutually exclusive either.
  
  How to build a big cargo ship under anarchism?
  
  It's simple:
  1: crime syndicate likes bananas
  2: crime syndicate steals a cargo ship
  3: you have now produced a cargo ship
  
  Because all syndicalists are evil. Do you really believe this statist propaganda?
  
  I don't even see the problem. If workers collectively come to consensus about the design, what hinders them from agreeing on a schedule and working on it?
  
  How small, decentralized communes will handle such a big enterprise, delivery of steel, schedule of works, deliver of engine etc. without some central planning?
  
  Decentralized can still mean that there is a big system of councils. The difference is that these are bottom up organized. If there is a consensus to build something big, there will be a way to make it. Maybe a committee that's only for this specific task and will dissolve afterwards and can be desolved by the council earlier.
  Zoe Baker made a good video about anarchism and democracy. You should check it out. It's also about decision making in big scales within the anarchist tradition.
  
  Any historical serious precedence of a success of such a management system?
  
  The video has some. Maybe most best known is the CNT which was a network of free association. A modern example would be Rojava which is not democratic centralism but democratic confederation and therefor decentralized. Of cause, all these are suppressed by all states and therefore it is difficult to implement. Arguably, quite a lot of (but by far not all) organizations before modernity were hieracy free and some still are. the famous anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber once said that anthropologists have a affinity to anarchism because they know it works. He himself did research in Madagascar where, according to him, the state does very little in the rural areas. You should read his work or watch this interview from arround 2005.
  
  Please excuse me but I do not like to watch videos, especially in foreign language, since my listening skills are bad.
  all these are suppressed by all states and therefore it is difficult to implement
  For me, it is more than obvious that from this and other reasons, anarchism is an utopia and not realistic in the real world. Thank you for the effort of presenting me the ideas, but anarchism never lifted millions from poverty as ML and never was a serious state like USSR or PRCh.
  
  Thanks for addressing at least some of the points I was making. If you prefere to read, you should check out "Debt" by David Graeber and "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Or shorter essays by Graeber you can find in the anarchist library
  And obviously we will never know what would have happened if the USSR didn't destroy Makhnovshchina in Ukraine or the anarchosyndicalists in Spain. But reading your comments I see why they did... and the future of Rojava is still open. Let's see. And obviously anarchists never build a state, that's in the name...
  
  Explain then
  
  The concept of mutual aid laid out by Kropotkin is very much applicable to international relations. Many anarchist organizations are internationalist, eg indigenous struggles supported the German occupation of Lützerath. True, this isn't about the infrastructure needed but anarchism isn't isolationist

73 comments