In 1954 the United Fruit Company (which later rebranded as Chiquita Bananas) conspired with the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatamala. This became an exemplar of a category of 20th century political apparatuses called “banana republics” – autocratic dictatorships, generally in the global south, which were supported by the United States with the express purpose of supporting the unimpeded flow of cheap commodities into the imperial core. Other such banana republics included the turn-of-the-century government of Honduras, the state of Hawaii, and at various times Panama, the Philippines, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and, of course, Cuba.

This phenomenon was so called because of the centrality of both fruit companies to the series of coups and dictatorships and because of the instability they fostered – republics with the shelf life of a banana. However it must be clear that the objective of the United States in supporting often brutal regimes like that of Batista in Cuba was explicitly capitalist in nature. In many cases, throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, the US military, supporting American bankers and fruit sellers, took direct control over the political levers of many of these countries including, notably, Honduras, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Bananas have never failed to be political.

Now aside from the blood fertilizing so many export fruit crops, the desolation of indigenous kingdoms like Hawaii and of independent, democratic, republics like that of Guatamala prior to the 1954 coup there is another big problem with the tropical fruit trade: its carbon footprint. The production and shipping of each single banana contributes 80g of carbon to the atmosphere. For comparison, a locally grown apple, if raised organically (the caveats of “local” and “organic” here are important for later) extracts carbon from the atmosphere at a rate of 15,000 kg/year/acre. This works out, very roughly, to a net carbon reduction of 19g per apple.

And this gets to the two hearts of our recent “bananas under communism” discourse. See certain social democrats and left-liberals don’t like to believe that the imperial core would have to make any lifestyle changes at all if we were to overthrow capitalism and bring about a true economic revolution. For them the idea that communists are proposing they should not eat bananas is tantamount to betraying the very principles of socialism, this idea that we must unleash productive potential in some vulgar Stakhnovist sense of the word.

However what many eco-socialists, green-anarchists and other materialist communists are telling them is that one significant and necessary economic transformation that has to happen around the world is a pivot to a focus on local food production with the objective of feeding people where they live. Global supply chains that give the imperial core tropical fruit year-round and at cheap prices are still, to this day, lubricated with blood. Much of the world’s supply of inexpensive chocolate depends on child-slavery.

Beyond this, the carbon cost of growing and shipping cash crops like chocolate, bananas and other tropical fruit is exorbitant compared to the better option of growing abundant fruit trees local to any given population and that population eating that fruit.

Because this is the thing that a lot of the liberal banana-defenders miss: we aren’t saying some sort of scolding moral imperative like “you don’t deserve bananas filthy American” but, rather, we are saying, “grow your own damn fruit and share it with your own damn community.”

This will, of course, mean that availability of fruit will become more seasonal and consumer choice in the imperial core will shrink. That’s actually good though. Because, as other left-permaculturalists have pointed out, there’s another problem with mass production of out-of-season tropical fruit: it mostly sucks.

Tropical fruit bred to ship from Honduras or Guatamala to Prince Edward Island in the dead of winter is bred for shelf-life and hardiness. It must travel, by boat and truck, thousands of kilometers and across days to reach grocery shelves unblemished enough for the discerning imperial core consumer. In order to achieve this with a fragile banana the hardiest breeds are selected. If they taste good this is incidental. The logic of capital persists across all fruit strains. Most important is that as much of the fruit as possible is saleable at market. Second most is that it costs next to nothing to produce. Next is that it look pretty. If it tastes and smells good this is a nice bonus.

It’s not sufficient that we switch from bananas to apples. Apples put a lot of carbon back into the atmosphere via pesticides, artificial fertilizer and shipping. The same logic that gives us hard, aroma-free, green bananas on our store shelves also created and distributed the abomination that is the “red delicious” apple. Instead we should be putting fruit right where people live. Municipalities should plant local fruit trees for shade. Orchards should grow crops for sale within a local range of 100km or less as their principal targets. We should avoid pesticides and carbon-intensive nitrogen fertilizers in our fruit production and select fruit not for shelf hardiness but for aroma and flavour. This way of looking at fruit, especially the part about growing it freely in cities for anyone to eat, is the most critical aspect of what the environmentalist left is calling for. We’re not trying to take away your banana. We’re trying to give you pawpaws for free.

However, as a concession to our Banana-loving Stahknovists we must also remind them that it’s not just a bunch of revisionist ecological hippies saying this. It’s Karl Marx. “The determination of the market-value of products, including therefore agricultural products, is a social act, albeit a socially unconscious and unintentional one. It is based necessarily upon the exchange-value of the product, not upon the soil and the differences in its fertility.” Marx says in Capital Vol. 3 – part of an extended exegesis regarding differential rents on agricultural land – but this statement makes something very clear: capital is incapable of caring about soil health.

Now Marx goes on to make a very cogent point, that as the price of rents on land will be derived from the market price on crops grown on the least-fertile land a movement away from capitalism would ultimately lead to a reduction in the price of agricultural commodities that “would have the same effect as a reduction in price of the product to the same amount resulting from foreign imports.” In other words we can get more abundance by using land in a rational, non-capitalist sense, locally and, as such, side-step the need for imports.

And this is important because the liberals of the imperial core so worried that communists will take their tasty treats away are forgetting a key question of global revolution: if we overthrew capitalism what would you do to compel the global South to keep producing your bananas? Are you going to do what the United States did in 1954 and re-inscribe empire in order to keep the treat flowing in? Will we keep watering the cocoa trees with the blood of child slaves at gunpoint even under communism?

The truth is the decision will not ultimately belong to what is now the imperial core. If a revolution were to come the flow of cheap out of season tropical fruit would die back considerably as local farmers began to focus first on feeding themselves and their families rather than growing cocoa, coffee and bananas for export. The perverse economic incentives to produce cash crops don’t exist outside of capitalist compulsion and exploitation. To abolish capitalism will abolish green $0.80 per lb bananas on your grocery shelves. But this doesn’t mean the global North will starve. The socialist relationship to food, which no longer gears price to the rent that can be gained from the worst productive land, will allow for local crops to be available and affordable for us too.

There’s an old phrase, “farmers feed cities,” and it’s true. But right now many of these farmers live in the global South and starve to feed the cities of the imperial core. This is the injustice that must end. Right now these farmers watch as climate crisis hits them with wet bulb temperatures, heightened hurricane seasons and drought. The global South is the frontline of the devastation of climate change. And so, ultimately, the shit that is really bananas is that comfortable progressives in the imperial core think they’ll have any choice at all when the revolution finally does arrive.

Your bananas will go. Better learn to like apples.