Having all or most necessary resources (food, water and electricity) provided within a small distance is a policy that all socialist societies should support. This could be achieved through solar panels, rain collectors, food gardens in every neighborhood, and small urban gardens in apartments. The advantages of this policy are clear and numerous. A self-sufficient socialist country (or any country) would find it much easier to defend itself than one with centralized food and energy production as there is no single place for an enemy to strike, meaning that attempts at counter-revolution would be less successful.
Self-sufficiency
Leo Walker
Jack Fisher
local self-sufficiency, as you describe it is just a longer leach, you can't make all the components locally, not just the obvious ones like Solar-panels but probably also for agriculture, where you might loose plant species, to a pest or a drought. Seed-banks where you can store & retrieve seeds require special environmental conditions , which makes them somewhat centralised, and definitely not local. You can flat out forget about making solar cells locally, some fabrication processes use particle accelerators to slice the silicon wavers.
As for defence against enemies, sorry but decentralising important stuff is not reasonable, the enemy can just pick off small local enclaves one by one. And defending stuff that is spread out is much harder then stuff that is centralised. Redundancy and resilience can also be had centrally. If you look at the current neo-liberal context you want to promote centralisation of socialist structures as to make them big and powerful enough to be able to coerce large corporations and financial structures. Democratic decision making should be capable of overruling decisions made in markets. Structurally you should think in terms of pushing markets to the margins, and planing as well as democratic decision making in the centre.
If you tell people to buy solar cells, gardening equipment etc you are effectively using the market for determining where resources should go, and the problem with that is that purchasing power is not distributed anywhere near the level necessary to achieve anything worthwhile.
In order to make the energy supply and and food supply sustainable in terms of the impact on the biosphere, there does not seem to be another way than tasking state-structures, simply because it requires a high level of coordination for the necessary parallel deployment.
Localism does not seem very fruitful at present, simply because the means of production are not miniaturised enough for that. This is more of a long term project in a established and stable socialist system where dependencies can be offloaded to communes. The point of doing this is mostly for logistical efficiency, not for strategical reasons.
Brandon Gonzalez
Christian Wright
aquaponics are only worth it if you got renewable energy surplus production so that the lower energy efficiency doesn't matter and if you kinda have to combine it with people paying only for capital cost, when they get food from these and have to help with the work, to avoid monetizing labour, to make this viable. You know removing labor-power from the circulating money, so that no profit can emerge from this activity.
Adrian Peterson
economy of scale > utopian small scale self-sufficiency
Andrew Cook
Isn't self reliance part of the basic strategy of Juche? Seems like it works for DPRK
Xavier Nguyen
cute af tbh
HOWEVER,
This:
Also weird coming from an ancom
Joseph Campbell
its questionable whether Juche is proactive or reactive as system of government. While self-reliance is admirable, they dont have much other choice
Matthew Perry
Yes but also we should strive for a fallback in case of emergencies so people can roll with ecological problems or whatnot until gommie FEMA can help.
Parker Edwards
local is a scale
Robert Bennett
You can't feed people with community gardens, at best they're a supplement of large scale agriculture and something nice for the neighbourhood that brings people together. Grow up.
Nolan Fisher
why is there a link to that gross /chemo/ page here.ew
Owen Nelson
I mean… you can if they're big enough. If we scale back urbanization so that cities aren't so dense and we have a more uniform distribution of farmland to residential area, we could have local, community-managed farms. That would also be good for the environment, since it would encourage people to grow locally native crops. A major weakness of capitalism's industrial farming is the over-reliance on certain staple crops like corn and soy. If you take economy of scale to the logical conclusion you get wide-spread mono-crops and the wrong conditions can then threaten your entire agriculture industry. The more distributed a system like that is, the more resilient it is to threats. A reasonable solution would find some balance between those extremes to offset the drawbacks both versions have, inefficiency vs security.
That and the more you distribute and diversify, the more diverse your food options. Food isn't simply a survival concern. Quality, variety (especially for nutrition), and simple differences of taste and preference are worth pursing as well.
Leo Perry
oh shit dude what are you doing
more uniform distribution of farmland to residential area isn't what we need at all, you want economy of scale gains for both
suburbs, small scale agriculture, artisanal production etc. are a blight, more dense urbanism and improved industrial agriculture would actually leave space for wilderness again
Benjamin Baker
You want to make people commute even longer?
Leo Walker
you really don't
the nature of scaled agriculture is not sustainable what you want is pretty much what op said and more uniform distribution f farmland to res would help a lot with that
if res/urban was crossed with agriculture you would increase air quality, reduce pollution, reduce traffic, lower transportation costs, reduce oil consumption. improve health, and really its like you ignored everything he said about monocropping and native species it seems like you don't really know what your talking about.
theres also a huge amount of water wasted growing specific varieties that have good shelf life and transportability local farms would increase diversity of produce available and most of these varieties are geared around a reductionist part in a machine fertilizing practices that don't take the system into account. monocropping with bare soil is seriously dumb as shit.
there are better species that are more nutritious with lower shelf lifes that require less water and self fertilize for example
Daniel Morgan
You don't have to make urban areas any more dense per se to get better economy of scale. I don't think you really get what these words mean, tbhfam. You could have bigger cities that are more spread out than a typical urban center.
Grayson Adams
user I…
Andrew King
I can tell you're americans. Please take a look at cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam or Vienna. They're not ideal by any means but a lot closer to what a city should be than the shitty sprawling car-centric mega-suburbs you call cities. gets it. Suburbia and cities that are built in the same fashion should be razed to the ground and replaced with appartment blocks, lots of public transportation (and no not just fucking buses which pass for public transportation in the US, we're talking rail here)
I'm still not sure about that. Couldn't you argue that if this style of farming were more efficient that it would've already displaced large scale industrial agriculture?
James Cruz
Back when I lived in Moscow, my primary school was 20min away by foot, my secondary school was around 30-40 (if i was dragging my feet) and pretty much everything from stores to markets was in range. The closest "supermarket" to my building was 5min away, but even then I was too lazy to actually run down the stairs (the elevator was often faulty and slow) and go for bread.
William Ramirez
The question is irrelevant to whether it's strategically sound, though.
Do you think any other revolution won't also have to react to capital strike? Might as well get a head start so when porky cuts off access to global trade the local economy is already prepared.
Gabriel Lewis
the amount of subsidies in industrial agriculture makes it essentially impossible. Industrial farming creates more food but requires more non-renewable inputs. It would require a planned transition to ensure people remain fed during the change. Some people say that a modern population is impossible to sustain without industrial farming and with our current layout of supply chains that is true.
I don't know how well the analogy works but its monocropping with bare soil is like raising a kid in a sterile environment. The plants and ecological network don't develop an immune system because they are culled back to sterility every year and all natural sources of nutrition removed disrupting the cycle. Evolution is put on pause to produce food that's inflated with water and sugar to fetch a higher price at the market at the cost of nutrition and health of not just the individual consuming it but the environment itself. You can watch the Mississippi basin bleed into the gulf of mexico from satellite as we wash away literally feet of top soil that took thousands of years to accumulate.
Building local farms to feed people directly is a strong form of dual power that takes material reproduction of human life from capitalists and puts it back in the hands of the community. If you give people food and shelter they are in a better position to learn how to be politically active.
Ian Rogers
news.cornell.edu
I'm not even a vegan, but the fact is most of our agriculture goes towards feeding livestock, where are pretty inefficient at converting the feed to meat. Sustainability on a local level would be somewhat reasonable from a pure staples standpoint; somethings of course have to be grown far away like fruits, but hopefully you can get 75% of your food from within 50 miles and 90% from within 500. Eating meat, especially beef, would have to be somewhat more expensive to account for this, and plans would account for the wastefulness of resources better. The main problem is there would have to be a lot more farmers than there are now, but I don't think that's a bad thing as spending half your week farming and half in a factory or whatever is a pretty good synthesis to keep from being burnt out.
Andrew Richardson
I think this could be solved really easily by having vegetables be pick-your-own. A lot of cities have parks that are in disrepair with large irrigated fields that already criss cross residential areas. Most agricultural labor is during harvest and monocrop could be solved with robots but perennial polyculture in alleyways, sidewalks and local parks that is and self picked and integrated into local water reclamation and earthworks and drain/sewege modification to decrease runoff would replenish groundwater rather than import. Asphalt and concrete actually creates deadzones around cities where runoff is too fast to maintain proper soil so you would want to break up streets and replace them with two lane public transportation and gardens.
John Baker
en.wikipedia.org
Aquire public grants to purchase parks for community owned co-ops to own the libs.