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?
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:
- 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.
- 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. In this case, 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.
I’m going to offer an unpopular opinion and say that any state that is too small to sustain its population using its own territory is not viable and needs to either expand its territory or be assimilated by a larger neighbor. The pretense of independence of microstates is just that, a fiction. When a country is entirely dependent on others its sovereignty is on paper only. Its people will in reality be subject to the whims of other larger countries while at the same time not being able to have any say in the policies of said countries. This is effectively a colonial relationship. A microstate that is relatively well off due to serving as a finance haven may be a privileged neocolony but it is still a neocolony.
Does this mean that Norway is by your definition a neocolony?
Norway is a big country. The topic was microstates. Basically anything smaller than Luxemburg is not viable as an independent state. Though i would make an exception for island nations with enough territorial waters to feed their population and have a viable economic basis despite their small landmass.
What makes Luxembourg specifically the lower limit of area for a viable country? If it is that a country smaller than Luxembourg cannot feed its current population using only the resources of its land and territorial waters, then my point is that there are also countries way bigger than Luxembourg for which this is also the case – but you could not call these countries microstates or neocolonies with a straight face.
It’s exactly this type of nation that socialism can help, by empowering national development, changing the logic of how the country works internationally, the issue is that it’s always a traumatic experience the post revolutionary situation. And the change will not come by vote, so if you believe that Marxism can change things the only way to change things is to find an organization and join them or create one. It’s not an easy job but its the only one that can be done
I understand where you are coming from. It just seems so impossible in current world climate. Let alone such a high GDP for it’s small size, with little to no influence in world affairs. Nothing material to offer for trade other than a service based economy, I doubt we would survive. Bigger nations have the added advantage on just self sufficiency to survive. We literally dont have sapce for agriculture or any industry.
I find it puzzling for a country not to have space for neither, what is the source of the economy of the country? Even if its the export of natural resources I would think that processing the resource before exporting should be both viable and desirable. In any case the most effective source of fighting for any postive change is through organized Marxist action, although I know that often said organizations are far from powerful enough right now to do something that’s why its important to expand their ranks
What are you? Singapore?
To avoid confusion I’ll say it -Gibraltar.
I didn’t make any comments guessing it was Gibraltar, but honestly I had a suspicion it was Gibraltar. I would recommend that you look into urban agriculture, generally keep reading theory and reading local history and news and interacting with your local environment, and learning about regions similar to Gibraltar. Gibraltar may have virtually no industry now, but I wouldn’t be so sure that this will always be the case. A fun game you might want to try is to take something you know to be true, imagining that it’s somehow become the opposite, setting a time frame for this change, and then trying to imagine how this change came to be.
By the way, were you worried that mentioning you were from Gibraltar would trigger a discussion about the conflict surrounding Gibraltar’s status? I definitely have semi-informed things to say about that topic, but I don’t know if now’s the right time.
“By the way, were you worried that mentioning you were from Gibraltar would trigger a discussion about the conflict surrounding Gibraltar’s status?”
Yes. Pretty sensitive issue for us. If you like to know more about our views, you are welcome to ask.
It seems a rare opportunity, so yes, I would like to know from the horse’s mouth as it were.
Singapore is a pretty significant petroleum and circuitry exporter. They’re also, you know, not western.
As long as you’re not in Monaco or the Vatican (is that you, Francis?), there will be a sizeable proletarian class, and potential for a leftist/labor movement. And the idea that your nation is dependent on “capitalism” to survive is not accurate. It’s dependent on trading with foreign markets, which is something socialist nations also do, and in most cases, nearly every nation has to in order to prosper. It’s not a matter of Socialism or Capitalism, but mutually beneficial trade.
No not Monaco or Vatican. Just not sure which socialist countries we can trade food with. Cuba, China or Venezueka are too far from Europe. If other more powerul European nations could act as a catalyst for socialism. Things can change quite rapidly in the future.
You know that Cuba, China and Venezuela don’t only trade with other socialist countries right? Actually I’m glad you brought up Venezuela, because their biggest trading partner is literally the USA, the same is true for China, but they’ve got several other large partners besides the US. International trade is something that happens regardless of your government’s political leaning, and nearby nations will always prefer trading with each other due to simple pragmatism, unless there is an exceedingly rare situation, like war or severe embargoes.
You’d be surprised how much produce worldwide is shipped from China. Garlic is a big one.
“We trade our services for goods” What made you think that was incompatible with socialism. Commerce isnt Capitalism. The reason a lot of socialist nations end up being so self reliant is capitalist nations embargo them. In a socialist world there would be MORE international cooperation not less.
Now are banking services really all that lucrative under socialism? Not really. But you can do other things instead.
I’m not saying socialist trade is incompatible. We are not living in a socialist world right and we depend on capitalist trade out of necessity to exists.
Thats true of all capitalist nations tho. Even the most powerful and large ones economies would collapse if cut off from all trade
Socialism is placing control of your country in the hands of organs of the working class, e.g. a socialist party, and by necessity using this control to oppress the capitalist class and thereby direct production for the needs of the people rather than the chaos of profit-driven production. So there are two ways to think about socialism and your country.
The first is what socialism may do within your country, as in what would happen if your country was run by a socialist party, could organize production for people’s needs, oppress the capitakist class, etc. Looking at your country in isolation, this would mean you could take what you do produce and funnel the proceeds to what your people need. It sure sounds like having a large reserve of nonperishable food and vitamins would be a smart way to provide security for the people there and I bet there isn’t yet proper centrally coordinated stockpiles. In addition, you mention Caribbean countries so I assume it may be one. Caribbean countries also suffer from extreme weather, particularly hurricanes, and you could direct your state resources to building resistant housing and shelters, drainage strategies, power systems robust to storms, clean water robust to storms, etc. Socialist governments tend to focus on public infrastructure like this, things that help everyone and improve security and stability. They also tend to promote education and healthcare.
But we should think beyond your country as well. As someone else mentioned, it is arguable that your country is not sovereign, and part of that is not having food sovereignty. If it is not possible for your country to be good sovereign due to a lack of land, you will only be able to have sovereignty as part of other countries’ interests. This might look like a confederation with neighboring countries or it might look like a country like China making it so that when the US inevitably tries to destroy any people-serving project you create (e.g. sanctioning you like it does Venezuela), you will have a trading partner and can therefore survive. It is mostly capitalism and its nation-states that itself undermines your autonomy. The more that other countries are run by socialists, the more you will be able to make decisions independent of Washington.
Re: depending on capitalism, this same kind if scenario actually exists for all socialist countries. They exist within a capitalist world and interact with it on the basis of doing steps similar to capitalism in order to develop. Some, like China, even allow capitalism itself to explicitly exist for large segments of the country as part of a larger development strategy, where the plan is to reign it in on the regular, like it is a caged beast. But really, countries are nearly all dependent on trade and are not able to be sovereign through full self-sufficiency and the threat of US sanctions would be quite devastating just like it would be for your country. A given country might have food sovereignty, or something close to it, but US sanctions still hit it hard. So what I’m saying is that your country is not so different despite having some unique circumstances.
Finally, you may be thinking of what it would mean to lose the financial services (presumably tax haven) income to your country. If you tried to assert sovereignty, the US would indeed probably pull the rug out from under you there. So this “industry” is not so much a boon for your economy so much as it makes you a dependency with a distorted economy that serves primarily to hide companies’ money rather than create goods or services. This makes your country vulnerable, not subsidized. This puts you in the same situation as colonies and neo-colonies that have been forced to build their whole countries around exporting just a few things, usually at a technological disadvantage (e.g. Venezuela exporting oil). And in those scenarios, socialists have recognized this as a vulnerability and tried to build out more of a real productive economy that makes them less vulnerable, even though the US / The British marked them for death. The exact way you would want to develop would depend on knowing much more about your country’s demographics and possible material bases and whether you would be able to align with e.g. Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, and China. That would be a project best suited to someone like yourself based on extensive research and familiarity with the needs of your island nation by doing the work of organizing and seeing first-hand what is needed, what is missing, what cottage industries could be improved and scaled, where schools are needed, etc etc.
Really informative. Thank you.
