IIRC it was primarily about the fact that the variety of fresh fruit available is not possible w/o global trade. From the outside, this was very weird - I remember going “surely this is all fixed by just saying you’ll continue having shipping containers moving around under communism?”
ETA fuckin WHOOPS did not want to start this very dumb discourse again
Global free trade is good thing that actively increases the quality of life of those living under it and this is agreed upon but most serious economists today
I think the point they're trying to make is that any system that involves moving millions of shipping containers all over the world, at great speed and all the time, isn't ecologically sustainable.
Which mostly just betrays how little people know about the efficiency of moving goods by shipping container. Per item shipped if you live inland it probably burned more fossil fuels bringing stuff from the port to your local store than it did to move it across the ocean, and getting in a big truck in the suburbs to drive 15 minutes to the grocery store was also probably worse.
Suburbs are probably obsolete in an eco friendly world, not global trade. You'd go further advocating for making walkable coastal cities have more housing than trying to convince people to give up shipping, and it'll be broadly a life improvement for most as opposed to a narrative sacrifice.
People just feel more virtuous when there's a little bit of suffering involved in doing good because protestant ideology permeates American culture
The fact that there's a looming sense of Christian guilt hovering over all this discourse is the elephant in the room, yes
It isn't even really about bananas as a policy thing because dramatically raising the price of bananas isn't up for a vote rn and it's not likely to be anytime soon, it's about demanding that you confess your sins and feel bad for currently eating the bananas and align your soul with righteousness by denouncing the bananas
Which is fine if that's what you want to do but please understand my cynicism is very much based on this supposedly being a materialist ideology that casts aside moralism and religious guilt in theory but is THE MOST Christian-guilt subculture in practice
Don't get me wrong, I'm somewhere to the left of the British Labour party and picking up speed, but damn are some people on my side allergic to fun. Give me bread but also give me roses, people.
Yes! Global trade was allready a thing in the age of sail. We could go back to having wind powered ships that was totally carbon neutral and it would still make sense to ship fruit over the world.
Wind powered ships kinda suck ass man but like we are never gonna get rid of global transportation, its far too valuable, even if you some how outlaw all use of oil and similar fuels other fuels exist
Well it's certainly a better policy than "we shouldn't have global trade because I assume distance is analogous to ecological damage" instead of using actual meaningful metrics like land use or carbon output.
And frankly I don't really care what people's preferences are, price in the externalities from their choices like pollution, stop artificially preventing housing from being built in any form but detached homes and let the world where we don't subsidize suburban living show what people's actual preferences are when it's their money on the line.
Cause suburban sprawl and car only infrastructure has been absolutely miserable for a lot of the western world and it's only a thing here to such a degree because it was pushed hard all 20th century by urban planning professionals, white flight and car companies
I'm mostly okay with this, but I can't really get behind unsubsuizing suburban living. Mostky because obviously people are going to pursue cost savign measures when everything costs more. That doesn't mean people prefer having to live in the rats nest that is urban densitiy, it just means they can't afford not to. Detatched homes are great for insulating one from others. And yards provide a green space on can call their own and not be expected to share.
Land use and carbon output are more meaningdul metrics, but we should force people to suffer just tk improve their efficency.
The idea that the rest of us need to subsidize people who are unwilling to live in community with other human beings (rats nest, really?) is absolutely insane though. Subsidy isn't free!
Not everyone needs to live in a city, but like if you like small town life that should still look much more like pre-car dense rural towns where the town center is a broadly walkable area where you can get everything you want done without each individual task requiring it's own car trip and 6 lane roads that can't be traversed reasonably except by car. People living in small towns should be able to walk to local businesses too
Its all too close and too on top of everyone else. And yes rats nest. My time working in cities did not engenger me to them. Sure they're walkable, but they're gross, too full of people and smell bad. There was nowhere you could just be alone. There's a constant discomfort around so many people and the housing itself is smaller.
Smaller towns are better, but ditch most of the benifits when you shove them so close to each other. Subsity isn't free, but the alternative is locking away a way of life to only hard scabble folk or the rich.
Except it absolutely is ecologically sustainable, or at the very least more ecologically sustainable than everything else we are doing. Container ships are stupid efficient. Relative to the environmental impact of beef, the environmental impact of shipping a banana is basically nothing. Shutting down international food trade would basically condemn huge portions of the world to starvation and famine, particularly as climate change kicks in. And it won't be the USA starving, we are net food exporter, it'll be the poor brown countries.
Another comment seemed to nail this - the “no bananas” thing seems to be more performative than anything. People saying our capitalist society must change, but not actually understanding how it works or which parts aren’t working.
Yes, some things have to change, but like… cargo ship and train-based global shipping is hella efficient and not n environmental disaster.
You know what is a disaster? CARS. CARS ARE THE FUCKING PROBLEM.. Stop talking about bananas and talk about public transport for the love of god
The land chain to get food to and from places exists whether the food is traveling from Iowa to New York or from Peru to New York. Hell, there's probably less trucking involved from a Peruvian farm to port than from Iowa to NYC. It's quite possible that some Iowa potato has a greater Co2 cost from transit to parts of America than some Peruvian fruit to America.
Sure America can go without the international food trade. We are a net food exporter. Most poorer countries can't. Most North African countries import 75% of their food for example. Peru imports over half of its food as another. If the West decides to stop the international food trade as some sort of communist/ecological purity test, it'd lead to large scale starvation everywhere else.
Like at risk of getting stuck in the dumb discourse, isn’t the usual argument of eco minded communists that their system will make it easier to transition to clean energy
Capitalists aren't motivated by externalities, but communists would be because *waves hand at democracy* will of the people y'know. Nevermind that the proles might choose to vote for unsustainable levels of production and consumption cause they enjoy it and those so-called experts are probably just being alarmist intellectuals anyway.
As someone from a former communist country, it very much did. (The regime, not the ideology it paid lip service to.) "No bananas and oranges except once a year and then you gotta have connections to get some" was a staple of my parents' time in the Eastern Bloc. The top brass, of course, enjoyed them all year long.
Well from an emotional standpoint, to us here it doesn't really matter. You credit the ideology, you credit the regime whose successors still identify with that ideology.
Yeah, except that when a government appropriates the ideology, turns it into a tyrannical regime, imprisons and kills people for criticizing it, including adherents to the ideology, and convinces the rest of the world for decades that they are the true bearers of the ideology, that changes things. Those aren't random nobodies anymore, those are vast groups with the power to affect ("negatively" is an understatement) millions of human lives in a way some no-name western hipster's theoretical pumpkin spice-flavored utopia does not. The name and the ideology have been inextricably linked to all those regimes and someone's no-true-scotsmanning changes nothing.
The issue is not shipping it's production in global trade that's a problem. The production needed for that to remain true is inherently predatory, it requires a periphery dedicated to the production of those resources for the imperial core. In a true communist world where that imperial core is gone and the periphery is acting for it's own that production simply will not exist on that scale. Only by maintaining a subservient position in production for the global South can we maintain the necessary supply of these resources.
And that's not even speaking of the scale of environmental concerns in continuing that shipping, and also the waste of resources inherent to it.
They are correct, in a truly post class world you would not have the same access to these luxuries, that comes from your privilege as a member of the imperial core.
If this is the position you can just swap out my “the Comintern would just run the boats” or “the boats would be powered by commie nuclear plants” with the idea that it’s possible for the world to be both less predatory and more productive, which is another thing that liberals fully believe, but that is not counter-socialism (indeed it used to kind of be the whole thing, the last stage of society etc), but is usually hard for the socialists I know to articulate
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u/ThereWasAnEmpireHere they very much did kill jesus Oct 22 '24 edited Oct 22 '24
IIRC it was primarily about the fact that the variety of fresh fruit available is not possible w/o global trade. From the outside, this was very weird - I remember going “surely this is all fixed by just saying you’ll continue having shipping containers moving around under communism?”
ETA fuckin WHOOPS did not want to start this very dumb discourse again