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.
You’re discussing the technical side, while the parent comment is pointing out the main issue lies largely on the social / organizational side, which the article just conveniently handwaves away.
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.
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.
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.
There are already people working on decentralized insulin production, quick google search brought me to this: https://openinsulin.org/
Finally, someone who at least speaks (if not thinks) in a true libertarian way!
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.
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.
Please don’t project your strawman view of an “anarchist community” here. None of these things you mention can not exist in an “anarchist community” nor is there even such a thing as a single “anarchist community”.
If anything, anarchist production principles are probably more suitable for all the things you mention, than the current ones that are at the wims of external investors with competing interests.
nor is there even such a thing as a single “anarchist community”.
How large can an anarchist community be so the decision process maintains the libertarian proposal of social organization (direct involvement/participation, no representation, decision mostly by concensus unless critical in time and blocked by an insignificant minority).
I’d say pretty small.
I feel certain comments are creeping in the direction of violating rule #4, but I will nevertheless echo the observation previously given, that an “anarchist community” is less a concrete entity than it is an abstraction used to facilitate discussion, the same as other social structures, such as family, town, or firm.
Most people agree trivially that a society that produces insulin is vastly superior to one that produces no insulin. Given that the necessity of insulin production is not a locus of controversy, the only further points needing to be agreed are the ones relating to the organization and methods of production, and to the delegation of responsibility, just as is required in any society.
and to the delegation of responsibility, just as is required in any society.
you are making all that fuss about community, family, town, … only to pass this authoritarian construct labeled “society” under the table. Massive “social groups” require central authority and organization, communities don’t or in reverse the size of community is determined by the ability to decentralize decision and avoid hierarchy.
Is this specific to pharmaceuticals or does it apply to all mass industrial production? Who decides for mass industrial production and when?
It always comes down to a decision process, and that separates the libertarian proposal of social organization, the Marxist capitalist reform, and that other doctrine we are aiming to escape from.
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.
