An interesting answer to "how will we get insulin and/or bananas in an anarchy?"
An interesting answer to "how will we get insulin and/or bananas in an anarchy?"
I should abandon Twitter, I know, but let's take a brief Twitter detour that I feel is relevant to the subject we just left behind in last month's series. There has been a lot of talk amongst and against leftists in the Discourse lately regarding two things I want to
This is a very good topic but the article does a poor job at explaining it.
The issue with insulin is not really the technical feasibility but the required economical organisation to produce it. How can an anarchist community produce insulin, or anything complex without leaders or economical motivation? This is the question the article fails to answer. I have no doubt it would be feasible but a long argumentation on the subject would be nice to read, instead of this "I'm tired of the tropes, so I must be right" nonsense.
The article does give an answer though. An "anarchist community" would not suddenly appear out of a vacuum and have to re-create everything from scratch. Arguing like that is indeed a tired trope and lazy strawman.
So any real "anarchist community" would have existing tools to make insulin (like the article says) and thus sufficient time to adapt them or come up with other means to produce insulin that are better suited for a non-hierarchical society.
It is a bit moot to speculate what these adaptations or alternatives might be, as we don't know what this specific "anarchist community" will look like. But if you have experience with process engineering you might realize that existing production methods are rarely the best or most efficient, but rather a result of the pre-existing equipment and capabilities at the time of developing the process. Furthermore existing production processes are rarely further optimized unless there is a strong outside pressure to do so, and in today's society it is usually easier for companies to rely on patents and monopolies to extract the maximum profit.
Pharmaceutical manufacture and process engineering aren’t subsistence farming. You can’t just have people pitching in when it suits them. You need tightly controlled supply chains, tightly controlled processes, strict change control, verification and validation. Good luck maintaining all that in an anarchist community.
An anarchist community cannot produce insulin - for the very same reason a capitalist or fascist community cannot. When we're talking about industrialized production, we are talking about things a whole lot bigger than merely communities. Simply focusing on community is myopic - a more relevant question would be, "How can an anarchist factory produce insulin (and other medicines)?" It's already a question far more grounded in what already exists.
Also, there is no such thing as "leaderless" organization, and there is no such thing as "leaderless" anarchism.
a more relevant question would be, “How can an anarchist factory produce insulin (and other medicines)?”
Yes, and it seems the actual point of confusion is simply how an anarchist society may achieve objectives that require larger scale than the level of local community.
insulin from microorganisms and bananas off of palmtrees.