So here is my dilemma. We import all food and goods, too small for agriculture. Our main economy is built on financial services and tourism mostly. Our social safety net and most of our let's say, liberal left leaning policies are being eroded as time goes by, which is not ideal, but is still better than nothing I guess.

However, since we trade our service based economy for essentially everything else, how does socialism help a nation so dependent on the world around it being capitalist to survive?

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I once saw a documentary about food independence in the Bahamas, but it seems like this documentary is gone from YouTube now, and I don't know where else I can find it. It brought up all sorts of techniques that Bahamians are using to grow their own food despite the negligible amount of arable land in the country. Other countries have dealt with a lack of arable land by simply building more land, but whether land reclamation is at all feasible in your country is not for me to say.

    In any case, there should be two aims for the food and goods issue:

    1. To become more self-reliant — even if a country grows only 20% of its own food, that's still more independent than a country that grows only 10%, and 10% more than 5%, 5% more than 1%, 1% more than 0%. Even if full food independence is impossible, even a small increase is better than nothing.
    2. To become less reliant on any one country or bloc — importing 80% of your food from, say, the USA, gives the USA a lot more influence over the country than importing only 20% of your food from the USA. Diversifying sources of imports protects the country from shocks to supply chains.

    I think we can compare a country to the case of an individual person: you sell your labor power to the capitalist class to get a wage that you largely spend paying for food, utilities, housing, other goods and services, and this ends up only giving that money back to the capitalist class. So it's a dependent relationship, you can't provide yourself with all of life's necessities. However, you can still find ways to become more independent, and you can find ways to get more of your necessities from other people in a way that doesn't feed into (or feeds less into) this dependent relationship. Doing these things, you might still need to sell your labor power to the capitalist class in order to survive, and you might still give much of your earnings back to the capitalists, but you'll at least have something to fall back on if you try to assert yourself and things don't quite go your way.

    So I might say that a focus for the left in your country should be organization across national lines. Wins for the socialists in the countries yours imports from is a win for your own country's independence. In other words, don't get too distracted by lines on a map, that you don't look at the systems of dependence themselves, because these systems also impact many regions recognized as parts of larger countries.