Hello all, I am wondering can you point me to reading material or share ideas on how manifacure of medicine(and other things currently requiring complex supply chains) can be achieved in anarchist society?
I recommend Ivan Illich’s “Medical Nemesis.” He says something like: “we need to recover community self-care to avoid medical iatrogenesis and we need to eliminate the root cause of the social, economic, hygienic, etc., aspects that make our bodies and minds sick”
Not an anarchist but a revolutionary Marxist, and I don’t really have any Anarchist literature to share on this topic but here’s how I understand it:
Essentially, both Anarchism and Communism operate within “production for use”, which sees things being manufactured for use and to satisfy people’s needs rather than for profit as commodities to be sold on a market, and so this necessitates economic planning - after all, how else would the community know what and how many goods they need to produce/trade for?
Anarchist economic planning is done communally via local assemblies with them also communicating their productive capacities (like what they can make and the manpower) and needs they cannot fulfill locally with other communes, creating a regional federated network of sorts. These federations would then coordinate with other federations globally which is where all the transportation networks and production chains requiring continental and planetary integration get handled.
How I imagine this would play out in reality is essentially an order based system, where factories making certain component would make X amount of goods, ship them over to their next step of assembly where they would be further developed or turned into a complex finished product and distributed to the corresponding communities.
And to address some of the comments I see here - the whole idea of “everyone producing as a hobby” or “everyone does work only when they feel like it” is absolute bs and is a surefire way to peoples needs not being met. If you’ve been told that you need to produce something like 100 tools or 100kg of grain as your quota to meet the needs, then it doesn’t matter if you feel like it or not - you gotta produce it, especially if its an essential good like food. Do not be detached from reality voluntarist utopian, read economic books like Marx or Kropotkin and whoever else Anarchists have - ground your claims in coherent doctrine.
I think some people’s working conditions are so horrible that they can only imagine doing work in response to coercive violence. Like it’s true, nobody in an anarchist society is going to flip burgers for 8 hours straight with 1 30 minute break being shouted at if production slows marginally. That is inhumane bullshit. Nobody is going to destroy their lungs in a mine without protective equipment and on long shifts that compromise safety because that is an insane thing to be forced to do.
Loads of work is meaningful shit, even if a lot of it is tedious and difficult. When a (functional) household or community organisation divides work it somehow manages to get things done without anything threatening each other. Feelings of obligation, love, respect, generosity, shame, guilt, and responsibility are extremely powerful motivators. Mining is hard and dangerous, but some people don’t mind that and will do it because it needs doing and commands respect provided they are treated with dignity.
The conditions of many jobs will have to change sure, and many jobs which serve only to elevate one above others will vanish (many freeing up huge amounts of resources. e.g. all the fucking energy and production that goes into stock trading computers) but the fundamental industries humans need to do change surprisingly little when you remove the capital.
Thank you very good and full answer.
I am again and again surprised how little things need to change to go into some sort of planned economy, be it centraly planned or request based economy.
I imagine it will look something like the DIY trans healthcare infrastructure that already exists in places where it has been banned, banned for new patients, or effectively banned.
Yeah this will “work” in a way, but do we want to create a society where this is the best form of medicine, I think there will be better solutions.
What you’re essentially asking is, “how will industry work in an anarchist society?”
It’s a very, very wide question, methinks - and a lot of the answer is going to depend on what it is you actually define as an anarchist society.
If you were to ask me how aspirin will be made in an anarchist society, the answer is simple - the same way we make aspirin now. But if you were to ask me how the raw materials needed for aspirin manufacture will be sourced in an anarchist society… well, now things start getting more interesting.
Aspirin is easy - thermo-nuclear weapons is difficult.
Serious question, how about making biological drug compounds like monoclonal antibodies?
The exact same factors apply.
Industries is built on top of other industries - for instance, producing monoclonal antibodies without someone supplying you with polyethylene glycol (which already requires a sophisticated production process and supply chain of it’s own) is going to be difficult.
It’s the relationship between the actors inside and inbetween these industries that should be the focus of anarchists - not their complexity.
I’ve been waiting to reshare this link!!!
https://fourthievesvinegar.org/
Its very, very out there, but they have developed solutions for manufacturing cure for hep B, etc cheaply and effectively using stuff you can get cheaply - or steal. They also have a full suite for, exploring production pathways and refining them. They do a lot and at some point I’ll put together a Lemmy post about them and what they do, if you are a scientist/developer they really need those skills!
This, unlike other examples which will be posted in this thread, is a good example of direct action. And I feel looking at examples like this is a much better way to understanding anarchist societies, since we seek to build a new world inside the old - and eventually supersede the old one.
I actually use their technology to look into the complexity of certain medications, and how many steps it would take to create (drug). The thing is, a shocking amount of things are very, very simple to create, and would take hardly any effort.
I hate how cheap it is to make the ADHD medication I need, and how controlled the process is.
The guy who heads that gave a fantastic Defcon talk showing it in action.
What is it that you think would be a barrier? anarchism isn’t when you’re not organised. It’s when you’re not forced.
People can still be organised, everyone needs medicine and sees it’s benefit. Would you help? whether that’s growing or gathering precursor materials, managing inventories, doing synthesis, maintaining and building machines, hosting educators and specialists, or transporting goods. The work involved isn’t different from what everyone already does.
People can, and have, and still do organize completely without any kind of hierarchy/leadership. So… Likely exactly the same way they do now, with the exception that they wouldn’t have some pencil pusher who doesn’t know medicine from dogshit telling them how, when, where, and what to make so that he can show some sycophants a line going in an upward direction.
People can, and have, and still do organize completely without any kind of hierarchy/leadership.
There is no such thing as human organisation without leadership.
Having a “Board of Directors” is how we do it.
The community elects the board, and the job of the board is to figure out how to do what the community wants. Absolutely no hierarchy or leadership (except from within the community).
Having a “Board of Directors” is how we do it.
Lol! You don’t even have an anarchist society yet, and you already want to hand fancy-sounding titles out?
Care for a suggestion?
The concept of a leader is an intentionally vague and next-to-meaningless idea in our hierarchical society - despite the fact that people lead and follow in our societies all the damn time.
Perhaps it behoves anarchists to actually go back to the drawing board on this one and actually redefine what it means to be both a “leader” and a “follower”?
Brother, you need to look up what a starfish enterprise is. Leaderless organizations exist right fucking now.
Googling gets me a few companies with that exact name but no general concept of what that is.
Brother
We are not related.
Leaderless organizations exist right fucking now.
No. It doesn’t.
Depends on the medicine. You can make a lot yourself, check out Michael Moore’s books. (Not that one, the other one). For pharmaceuticals you had better study your chemistry and bio. Many things are not so hard, but difficult to scale, and expensive depending on the drugs. You’re going to have to have a pretty driven and skilled collective to make it happen.
Is this a ‘how can we do complex production without capitalism’ question or a ‘how can we motivate people to do work without capitalism’ question?
Former: Catalonia ran entire industries while at war. Something needs doing and it isn’t getting done? Volunteer, find people to help you, etc.
Latter: I dunno, ask your mom how she cleaned and fed you for decades without financial compensation.
Bonus: a significant portion of drug research at least in the US is (or was anyway) funded by the US government, so capitalists aren’t exactly doing all the work themselves.
Silk road baby!
Jkjk
I think one thing people need to think about is that if we succeed in abolishing capitalism, then all medicines become public domain, no more proprietary formulas, and no more profit motive.
So instead of a few dozen or hundred scientists and business-persons figuring out production of medicines strictly constrained by maximum profit (industrialized automation, single point of manufacture, distribution, etc), instead, we’d have potentially millions of people looking at the science and working on sustainable, local, and easy-to-produce formulations that put people, not profits, first.
We need to understand that the reason medicines currently require complicated expensive machinery and huge supply chains is due 100% to the profit motive. That reality ceases to exist post-capitalism. We HAVE to learn to think outside of the confines of “capitalist realism.”
I mean is it 100%? I do agree with most of what you said and I am very not familiar with meds manufacturing, but I will give example with similar product, fine electronics.
In that case rare earths are just… rare so there even tho patents and the profit motive play a role and even a big role, it is not 100%.
Electronics are an interesting case. In our capitalist global economy we use extortion and threats to secure rare earth metals so we can use them for critical green technology and warfare while also using them to pump out televisions and phones for people to buy to replace ones that work fine (or could be kept working fine if we avoided software bloat).
Plastics are similar, they’re essential for medical applications but we also use our limited fossil fuel resources for cars and to wrap bananas at the store.
You could ask the question of how we could afford to let capitalism distribute these resources.
Working in the software industry I see tremendous waste, absurdly inefficient technologies being used because they’re cheap, etc.
We could all work less, work on the more important things, and make better use of our resources if not for the unnecessary inefficiencies introduced by duplicating effort, hiding technological advances from one another. We should be moving towards a cooperative rather than competitive economy.
Read The Dispossessed.
Have done, very good book! Le Guin is a legend.
A lot of pharmaceutical production is moving from complex chemical processes to utilizing genetically modified microorganisms to produce the substances more or less directly. This makes it about as complex as a modern beer brewery.
Do any beer breweries genetically engineer their yeast? Honest question. I was gonna use that question to counter you but then I realized I wouldn’t be surprised if some already do, and IMO that would be pretty cool!
They usually depend on yeast strains that have been optimized with traditional selection methods for centuries, so there is little need to modify them further. But modern genetic methods are used to monitor and prevent unwanted further mutations AFAIK.
This makes it about as complex as a modern beer brewery.
how on earth is making a GMO as simple are brewing beer?!
I cant tell if ur joking or being serious
I have a genetics researcher in the family that brews beer as a hobby, who would have a field day replying to this comment! Unfortunately I posses knowledge of neither but I feel like the answer would not be simple or straight-forward.
Once you have the genetically modified organisms obviously. But making the genetic modifications doesn’t need a very complex setup either, a typical university research lab is sufficiently equipped to do so.
I think I actually read something similar about people doing it in garages(not that I recommend it) the article was around COVID so it was about home made bio weapon. There are kits online and I have no illusion that tomorrow this will produce industrial quantities insulin(that’s why the price is so high right RIGHT?) but the idea may be not so far fetched as it initially sounds.
Not exactly what you asked, but…
I think that in an anarchist society, much of the “medicine” mindset would fade away. An anarchist society would have no human supremacists, so people would not eat animals or use them for medical experiments. This alone would prevent a great deal of ill health. While certain drugs can be useful in emergency situations (like opium for pain relief during and after surgery), most if not all of these emergency “medicines” can be found in some form in the plant kingdom and do not require complex manufacturing processes. Modern medicine and “better living through chemistry” is really quite a recent concept, and the pharmaceuticals of today are no more necessary for health than anything that the snake oil salesmen were selling 200 years ago. The current medical industry is one of the largest and most profitable capitalist enterprises in the world, with a huge financial incentive to keep people sick. (I recommend the documentary They’re Trying To Kill Us which explores how the medical industry, fast-food industry, and government are interconnected in oppressing people.) Take away the profit motive, and 99.9% of “medicine” in the world would disappear, and we’d all be better off as a result.
What good is a vast amount of learning if what you have learned is not true? The medical profession has from the beginning based its practices upon false principles, hence throw physiology out the window and poison the sick with nostrums. We do not seek warmth of an iceberg, so why seek health from a poison? Let’s get our principles straight. Health comes from healthful influences and agencies. Drugs, all of which are poisons, do not belong among the health-building factors of life. – Herbert Shelton, Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life (1968)
there are lots of things that pharma companies do which are abusive, but the existence of treatments is rarely one of them. Herbal medicine is cool but inconsistent, relying on inconsistent medicinal dosing will kill people. Other comments point out the question is more “how to do industry” than anything else. And no 99.9% of medicine disappearing will in fact kill people.
This is not something you want to speculate on, the point is that in an anarchist society, biochemical engineers, doctors, researchers, would be figuring out methods to make and produce useful medicine. Dont go all primitivist on it because it’s a complex problem that capitalism leeches from parasitically.
I am not advocating for the use of herbal medicine nor for anarcho-primitivism.
