They can hardly industrialize on a sustainable scale right? Tourism is their only possible lifeblood, along with extractive stuff like mining and fishing and being a tax haven. What viable path is there for them under a communist system?
I’m not sure I really understand the question. They’d just vibe? Other people would send them stuff they need bc we’d be efficiently allocating goods and industrial machinery? Folks would visit and hang out?
One of the things we mostly assume would happen if we ever manage to break capitalism is most of the false scarcity in society would go away. There’s no incentive for infinite growth or planned obsolescence or profit seeking or rent seeking. People lived just fine on Islands for thousands of years.
And there’s plenty of stuff to go around. We could build stuff to be vastly more durable and long lasting than we do. There are plenty of century old machines still functioning just fine. There’s no real reason to have a better phone every year except conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence. What even drives people to get new phones? Better cameras? I suspect it’s mostly planned obsolesence crap - broken screens, old batteries, all difficult to repaitr by design. I used to have a joke about how the soviet iphone would weigh six pounds, have a complete circuit diagram etched on the inside of it’s casing, have all user serviceable parts, be ugly as fuck, and get 5 bars on the moon.
it wouldn’t look like capitalist planned obsolescence but you do want some product lifetime management where things eventually fail and can be replaced by actual advances in technology. if everything is maximally durable you’ve wasted all those extra resources when a better MRI machine is invented or whatever and you replace things with decades of usable life that are mechanically obsolete.
Circular economies have entered the chat.
Highly durable materials are much easier to dismantle and reprocess. The entire waste argument against durability presupposes an economy where we just throw everything into a landfill instead of putting the materials back into the economy. No economy can sustain itself on MRI machines being disposable.
there are a lot of components in things that aren’t particularly reusable even in devices designed to last over a decade. MRI machines are by no means disposable, but they’re going to break down at some rate, and imaging technology will improve at some rate and there’s a sweet spot were you’re not wasting resources over-building the things but they last long enough to be replaced on what amounts to a schedule.
there’s also efficiency gains. It’s all well and good that my monitor from 15 years ago still works, but it uses more electricity than a newer one the same size so at some point it’s worth the cost to me personally now to get a new one and stop using this one even though i don’t “need” to, and in a post-revolutionary society it would be worth the resources of manufacture to replace it even though it’s not broken depending on the generation and other needs of the community. maybe some of these components are reusable but there are diminishing returns on energy intensive recycling processes.
Yes, and those components are waste. Reducing waste is a critical aspect of sustainable society, which means it’s a critical aspect of communism. Components that are waste should not cause reusable components to be dumped in a landfill. They should be engineered to be removable without much effort or ideally engineered out completely. Inefficient older models can be returned to a reclamation center to reclaim the materials to create the circular economy. You can’t claim energy efficiency as your goal when you rely on externalizing the waste of billions of products.
the soviet iphone would weigh six pounds, have a complete circuit diagram etched on the inside of it’s casing, have all user serviceable parts, be ugly as fuck, and get 5 bars on the moon.
nah it’d be all that stuff but only 5 ounces. Samsung galaxy S5 was around in 2014 and did basically everything today’s phones do, but had a removable battery and was lightweight
low weight and low volume is a practical thing, so commie tech would pursue it.
I’m not sure I really understand the question. They’d just vibe? Other people would send them stuff they need bc we’d be efficiently allocating goods and industrial machinery? Folks would visit and hang out?
Yeah I might be overthinking it. I guess with this question I wanted to open up discussion of how communist globalization or trade logistics would work? If I’m understanding you correctly, other countries with stronger industrial bases would “subsidize” them, for lack of a better word. I certainly have nothing against that, I mean it’s only fair.
Under communism tourism would be good actually, we just wouldn’t use planes for it anymore
communism will still have airplanes lol
for it
Sure, but we would only use them for emergencies, nothing else can justify such a stratospherical (pun attempted) amount of CO2 emissions
hardly. there’s a sustainable amount of emissions (or infinite if air capture runs on clean electricity) and the passenger-kilometer emissions works out favorably compared to alternatives some of the time. There are also short or mid-haul flight routes over terrain where we’re not gonna want to build rail where battery electric planes would be more efficient use of resources or peoples’ time.
But footfall would decrease drastically no? Like I’m guessing you mean sailing which could take months. Only the closest countries and their citizens with the most time on their hands would take the plunge
With modern ship building and materials science and weather prediction via satellites sailing ships could go shockingly fast. The fasest commercial sailing vessel ever made, the famous Cutty Sark, last of the tea clippers, could manage almost 700km a day. And that was in the 1860s. Modern ships using wind turbine driven screws so they could sail directly against the wind, complimented with solar or nuclear power, and armed with real time global wather surveillance would likely be capable of pushing that envelope much further.
I guess during the transition period, there wouldn’t be much interest in islands from a purely economic perspective. Ideally we would probably just fuck off and leave them alone like with North Sentinel Island, but Hawaii is already crushed by capitalism and we shouldn’t abandon them.
Take my mandatory 4 months off from work and hop onto a blimp to skip around some islands…
Under communism, China turns the Maldives into a massive island bigger than Taiwan
it will happen
Also the question is incorrect from the getgo
Anyone on an island can just choose not to be on the island. The world is big enough that every island could be evacuated and its people resettled in America, Europe, Australia, etc. Or one of many new irrigated geoprojects in the Sahara/Central Asia. The world’s “island population” is tiny
There would likely be job rotations for nearly everyone (everyone would shovel a little bit of shit and this is a good thing, and most jobs don’t require any real prior education) and maybe there’d also be place rotations to some extent. These rotations would be randomly chosen but also controlled so that everyone has a bit of everything (everyone does some dirty work, everyone gets to live in a various bunch of climates for a while)
The only constraint would be how many native cultures/languages you want to preserve, but I everyone’s gonna speak English as a second language for sure. English will also be completely decolonized and every official info source will be controlled by the JDPON
I also think it’d be nice if the “leaders” of such a society were on camera/mic 24/7 so that anyone on earth could check up on them x8billion I think this is a small price to pay for controlling the world
communism on one island, obviously
Cuba is a pretty big island, so i’m assuming you mean small ones like Grenada? the Antilles? i think the answer is they don’t get to do communism (Grenada) and if they somehow flew under the radar/capital is in disarray—but for some reason aren’t getting any help from anyone else—then all they can really do is an agrarian law, progressive social constructions and maybe light industry
So whatever is viable under capitalism is only moreso viable under communism. You don’t necessarily have to close your borders to the entire world, you can continue to trade with them in any way that you did before. The reason these countries are so poor under capitalism is that they work for bosses who take the profits and keep them overseas. This applies to agriculture, fishing and mining just as much as it applies to tourism. Local communities, if they were allowed to keep the profits from tourism, would do very well operating their own hotels. One reason it is so difficult for communist nations to thrive is actually that the international community isolates them and cuts off all avenues for trade and finance.
It also depends how you want to count an island. Barbados is obviously very small, but Cuba is 2.5x the size of Taiwan, so size is clearly no obstacle. Bermuda is only a tenth the size of Barbados, and does so well not purely because it is a tax haven, but because it has concentrated expertise in finance and insurance. Ordinary jobs are reserved for local people who grow up on the island (you cannot move there and take them for yourself), and educated professionals are recruited from overseas. In theory, these companies and the foreigners they employ contribute to the local economy and make everybody better off. Not sure if this is actually the case in reality, but I’m sure it could be if Bermuda were run by communists instead.
Research and environmental monitoring stations/bases. Volcanology, meteorology, geology, oceanography, marine life research, deep sea research covers all sorts of things up to and including aerospace tech… if there’s no much light pollution then astronomy research stuff in the visible light spectrum but there might be a chance for smaller radio telescopes having some utility.
Oceanic shipping and aquatic research vessels will need stations for refueling, maintenance, search and rescue.
If it’s lifeblood it’s lifeblood that is immediately sucked away by the vampires of capital.
