I First Encountered The Idea Of "pay Politicians More To Reduce Corruption" In College In The Context

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

I'm not sure why anyone would seriously mourn the death of Ted Kazcynski, when both a) his basic critique of technology is stupidly, fundamentally flawed to anyone who thinks about it for five minutes and b) plenty of morally palatable and effective enviormentalist protestors exist. But nobody's making any "Jessica Reznicek did nothing wrong" memes.

What about direct-democratic planning, with or without the recommendations made by a committee or any individual?

Instead of subordinating our economic desires and the associated information to the anarchic market, why don't we discuss potential economic activity and share all perspectives and information?

I’m not sure what a socialist society should look like, but I’m pretty sure of this: factor markets should be replaced with national, regional and local planning

"Importantly, the market and private property by themselves cannot prevent the total depletion of the commons. In fact, the depletion of the commons follows inexorably from the distributed actions of agents following profit and loss signals. It is only when private property is circumvented, where information not revealed by prices or profit and loss signals is taken into account, that sustainable use of common resources becomes possible."

The US doesn't have much of a welfare state, but its privileged position on the world stage absolutely translates into benefits for its citizens. Government contracts to build ships, tanks, and nuclear weapons provide high-paying jobs to American workers. Arguably, the US welfare state takes the form of our military, which provides soldiers with socialized/subsidized housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. In the private sector, American firms benefit not only from unequal terms of exchange, but from America's actions overseas such as the destruction and looting of Iraq. I agree with your main point; most countries have welfare states and/or universal healthcare and aren't imperialist, but we shouldn't ignore the ways that Americans have genuine incentives (beyond the ideological) to support invasions and aggression.

Thank God the us doesn't have universal Healthcare otherwise we'd be an imperialist power

Why does no one remember Iraq? For all of Trump's faults, at least he didn't start a war that killed or maimed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of innocent people and afflicted countless more with homelessness, hunger, trauma, and despair.

This feels the same as saying "why would a revolutionary oppose cutting welfare, this will just anger the proles and leave them with nothing left to lose!" People would probably react to mandatory service/conscription the same way they react to most hardship; with passivity and obedience rather than full revolt.

Many countries have mandatory service and it doesn't seem to have made them any more rebellious. Arguably the mandatory service of, for example, Israel and South Korea only serve to entrench their nationalist cultures (and in South Korea, it seems to play no small part in fueling a bitter and resentful mens' movement/backlash to feminism).

I think expecting a soldiers' revolt in today's world is to ignore that the best example we have (revolutionary Russia) only happened in the context of many millions of peasant soldiers being thrown into a horribly unpopular war for a government that many of them had never even heard of before. Many peasants did not even consider themselves Russians, and it still took tremendous slaughter before they began to seriously revolt in large numbers.

Finally, as an American I'm very loath to support any policy that would encourage anyone to join and support the military. Growing up in the War on Terror, a lot of people spoke positively about mandatory military service and I don't think that that program, if enacted, would have resulted in anything other than further suffering for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

i’ve made this post and argued about this before but i don’t get if you’re a revolutionary (of basically any stripe) why you would oppose mandatory military service—what could possibly be better than the state paying for training your future cadres and the people being just one seized armoury away from resembling an actual force—the point of all revolutionary movements is to start and win a civil war and somehow the volunteer service model is going to make that easier

also obviously conscripts are going to be easier to radicalise into defection than volunteers

What is land theft? Who owns land? Is it whoever settled it first? Whoever defends it from challengers? Should individuals own land exclusively or do people who share a certain culture or race have a right to own land exclusively? How are culture and race defined?

Put it simply, to heavily paraphrase James Conolly, what use is it for black South Africans to drive out white landowners if they will only end up being exploited by their own black bourgeoisie? Does it really make a difference what color hand holds the whip?

No Country For White Men: This after The Leftist Media spent all yesterday saying Trump was lying and it’s a “conspiracy theory”

So no king anywhere has ever said anything close to "I want to build up a massive army so I can beat my rival" or "I want to sleep with your wife"? From the other direction, are you also suggesting that ambition and ruthlesness are nowhere to be found among the peasant populations as well? From the other other direction, perhaps the stereotype of the lazy/fat noble exists for a reason?

Also just in general wrt “the king wants the same things as the peasants but the barons don’t”, I’m really skeptical of the amount of faith that monarchists tend to invest in that relationship because it seems like it has at least as much to do with the idea of kingly purity (e.g. “if only the Czar knew”) as with the actual relationship. But even where that relation exists, it’s not a statement that rulers of larger domains are more likely to agree with the peasants. The way the “king and peasants vs. the aristocracy” setup works even when it works is that the king is playing the two factions against one another and using the perceived legitimacy of his mandate – something lesser aristocrats lack – to defend himself against the faction otherwise most dangerous to his rule.  If you fragment that kingdom and now every barony is a tiny kingdom with its own court, the political class relations change completely; you can’t extrapolate them from how the region functioned as a province of a larger entity.