The Great Takeover and its reversal

A personal commentary

The development of the global economy, which has been institutionalised with the signing of the GATT Uruguay Round and the Setting up of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will, we were assured, usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity for all. However, as the contributors to this book have sought to show, this assertion is based on no serious considerations of any kind. On the contrary, for the bulk of humanity it can only lead, which it is already doing, to an unprecedented increase in general insecurity, unemployment, poverty, disease, malnutrition, and environmental disruption.

It is difficult for those who have had a modern education to understand why this must be so. We have all bean taught that economic development, measured by an ever increasing Gross National Product (GNP), is the key - the only possible key - to world prosperity and human well-being. Hence, all possible efforts must be made to maximize it, which means investing as much as possible in scientific and technological innovation, and making sure that the whole development enterprise is managed by ever larger and hence more "efficient" corporations, that cater for an ever bigger and 'freer" market.

However, this is precisely what we have been doing in the last fifty years, during which time development has been the overriding goal of governments throughout the world. Trillions of dollars have already been poured into development schemes by multinational development banks, bilateral aid agencies, and private enterprises. Revolutionary new technologies have transformed agriculture, industry, and services alike. Tariffs have been drastically reduced, and small companies, catering for the domestic economy, have been systematically replaced by vast transnational corporations catering for an ever-expanding world market. World GNP, as a result, has increased by six times, and world trade by twelve times. If conventional wisdom were right, then the world should have been transformed into a veritable paradise. Poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, homelessness, disease, and environmental disruption, should be but vague memories of our barbaric and underdeveloped past. Needless to say, the opposite is true. Never have these problems become more serious and more widespread.

By setting up the WTO, of course, governments are further accelerating the process of global economic development by removing all conceivable constraints on trade, and indeed on just about all the activities of the TNCs that control it regardless of social, ecological and moral implications. In other words, instead of accepting the incontrovertible empirical evidence that this policy can only increase the problems we face today, governments, under pressure from the transnational corporations, insist in pursuing it still further.

To solve these problems, as in their hearts, most people must clearly realize, society must follow the very opposite path. Instead of seeking to create a single global economy, controlled by vast and ever less controllable, transnational corporations, we should instead seek to create a diversity of loosely linked, community-based economies, managed by much smaller companies, catering above all, though clearly not exclusively, for local or regional markets. In other words, it is not economic globalization that we should aim for but economic localization.

In saying this, I am, in effect, calling for a reversal of economic globalization and indeed of the very process of economic development, of which globalization is but the logical conclusion. But this does not mean reconstituting the past. We have been indelibly marked by the experience of the industrial era and the local economies that we will seek to create cannot be slavish imitations of those that previously prevailed. However, since until recently, economies have always been largely localised, their experience must clearly be seriously considered.

To understand why economic development, leading as it must eventually do to economic globalization, must be reversed, means looking very much more carefully at what it really involves and what are its inevitable implications.

For perhaps as much as 95% of our tenancy of this planet, all those functions that today are fulfilled by the State and the corporations, were once fulfilled by the family, or perhaps more precisely the household, and the community. The household produced most of its food, though the more demanding tasks involved co-operation between households and sometimes by the community as a whole. The household made most of its own clothes and other artefacts, and acquired those that it did not make itself from within the community, it brought up the young, and looked after the old and the sick. The community administered justice, maintained social order, and assured that the traditional religious ceremonies were properly performed. It was thus largely self-sufficient, and indeed self-governing.

Jeremy Rifkin refers to Labour historian Harry Braverman, who tells us that in the U.S. as late as 1890 even those families living in highly industrialised regions, like the coal and steel communities of Pennsylvania, were still producing virtually all of their food at home - over half the families raised their own poultry, livestock and vegetables, purchasing only potatoes at the market.

Of course, communities in New England were originally self-governing as well, as is amply testified by Alexis de Tocqueviile in his "Democracy in America", and in parts of eastern France and in Switzerland, communities to a large extent still are today. [1]

David Korten refers to the largely non-monetised economy of the household and the community as "the social economy". For him, "social economies are by nature local, non-waged, non-monetised, and non-market. Therefore, they are not counted in national income statistics, do not contribute to measured economic growth, and are undervalued by policy-makers, who count only activities in the market economy as productive contributions to national output." But their function was more important-than this, for, to quote him again, "the very conduct of these activities serves to maintain the social bonds of trust and obligation, the 'social capital' of the community." [2]

If, until very recently, human families and communities were quite capable of looking after themselves without the intervention of any outside agencies, such as State institutions and corporations, so were the highly diverse ecosystems that make up the natural world, and it is largely on the inestimable benefits provided by their normal functioning, and on those of the natural world as a whole, that human life and indeed the life of all other living things has always depended.

As development proceeds, however, these critical functions are also taken over by the State and the corporations. Thus the nitrogen used to fertilise our land is increasingly produced at great cost in factories rather than fixed by nitrogen-fixing bacteria on the roots of leguminous plants, and the water we use, instead of being stored for free in the aquifers beneath the forest floor, is increasingly stored in large, man-made reservoirs.

It is now even proposed by economists (and tame scientists concur) that rather than cut down on emissions of greenhouse gases that are now on such a scale that the Gaian processes that have so far assured the stability of world climate can no longer cope, this function should be assured by vast geo-engineering schemes. Foremost among them is a plan to site 50,000 one hundred square kilometer mirrors in space in order to reflect away the heat of the sun and keep the planet cool. In other words, economic development is thereby not only the systematic shift to the formal monetised economy of the functions that were previously fulfilled for free by "the social economy' but also by 'the great economy", as Wendell Berry refers to the economy of the natural world as a whole.

The consequences of such an enterprise are of course dramatic. It can only cause the demise of the social economy, as the household and the community - its basic building blocks - are condemned to atrophy from want of use, and also for the same reasons, that of the "great economy" itself, both of which must become ever less capable of fulfilling their natural functions, which, as I shall argue, they alone are capable of fulfilling effectively and sustainably.

Community Disintegration and its Consequences The family has until recently always been the basic unit of social life, but it has also always been the extended family, and included people who lived in the same household and were not necessarily blood relations, rather than the truncated nuclear family of the type we have today. What is more, it formed an integral part of the community within which all its members lived and worked - and into which it practically merged, rather than exist as a little island of solidarity in a vast indifferent non-society as it does today. For this and similar reasons we should seek to overcome our present prejudice against this irreplaceable institution, which we tend to see as tyrannical and claustrophobic, and whose virtues are only vaunted by heartless right-wing politicians, whose overriding policies - ironical as it may seem - can only lead to further social disintegration.

Much the same can be said for the community, which has also now fallen into disfavour. It is an equally basic, one might say equally natural, unit of social organization, which it clearly must be since we have lived in extended families and communities during the whole course of our biological, psychological, and cognitive evolution. Alexis de Tocqueville, that great student of town democracy in New England, saw the community as natural, indeed God-given. "Man may create kingdoms" he wrote, "but the community seems to have sprung from the hand of God." [3]

Significantly, it seems to be only at the levels of the household and the community that most of the key social and economic functions can be effectively fulfilled, though of course to be able to do so these key social units must be sufficiently cohesive, imbued with the appropriate world-view - and in possession of the resources they require for fulfilling them.

Let us take an obvious example. One of the most serious problems our society faces today is a massive increase in all sorts of social aberrations, such as crime, delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism and general violence. These problems are conspicuous by their absence in societies that have not been fully atomised. For instance, a visitor could walk in the poorest slums of Calcutta, where large numbers of people are homeless and sleep out on the pavement, in almost total security. If this is so, it is largely that such people do not suffer from the terrible social deprivation that they do in an atomised society. They may be very poor and even hungry, but the life they lead within their family groups has meaning to them - which is ever less the case of the lives led by most people in the cities of the industrial world today.

Also in a traditional community, social order is effectively maintained by an extremely powerful force: - that of public opinion, reflecting traditional values, largely fed by local gossip - a key instrument for assuring adherence to these values - and hence for preventing crime and other social aberrations.

We have been taught to regard the pressure of public opinion as an intolerable intrusion into our lives. One of the great advantages of becoming an anonymous inhabitant of a big modern city is that it "liberates" us from the "tyranny of public opinion" which imposes on them all sorts of obligations to the members of their family, community, society and ecosystem.

But, no one has yet devised an alternative strategy for controlling crime and other aberrations, and hence for maintaining social order. The State can engage more and more policemen, spend billions on an ever more elaborate judicial system, and build more and more prisons, but all this has very little effect - and, in any case, it is but a means of masking the symptoms of a social disease, which by rendering a little more tolerable such expedients can only serve to perpetuate. Today, needless to say, as the global economy marginalizes more and more people, this disease can only worsen and spread to those areas of the world that have succeeded until now in remaining relatively unaffected by it.

The Community and Democracy

If crime and other social aberrations can only be dealt with at a communal level, the same must be true of democratic government. If democracy is "government by the people for the people", it is difficult to regard as truly democratic the sort of political system under which we live, in which individuals limit their contribution to governing themselves to voting every five years for a candidate over whose political conduct, until the next election, they have absolutely no control. This is particularly the case today, when the corporate world has mastered the art of influencing the outcome of elections by massive and increasingly sophisticated public relations campaigns, and whose interests, rather than those of the people who elected them, governments everywhere have now come to represent.

If government is to be really by the people, then they must themselves participate in the daily business of government, and it is clearly not at the national, let alone at the global level, that they can possibly do so, but only at the local level, among people who know each other, see each other regularly, and see themselves as members of the same community.

Jefferson also always insisted that face to face participation in municipal government alone enables citizens to subordinate what they take to be their immediate personal interests to the public good. He advocated that States should be broken up into local wards of such a size as to enable the full interaction and participation of citizens in their own government. [4] De Tocqueville, like the ancient Greeks "identified freedom with self-determination, and saw democracy as fostering freedom, precisely because it enabled people to participate in municipal government" [5]. He also noted how in the New England town democracies, where such conditions were largely met, "each person's cooperation in its affairs assures his attachment to its interests; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambitions and his future exertions." [6]

The Swiss system of government may also provide a model. It has always been based on the commune or "gemeinde", which is largely autonomous and self-governing. Traditionally it decides what taxes should be paid and how the community should spend the money allocated to it. It also actively oversees the communal administration, whose proposals and expenditures it can reject, and deals with such issues as public service, primary education, local police, and welfare for the poor and the sick. Really important decisions are made by a free assembly of the citizens.

Significantly the commune existed long before the cantons into which the confederation is now divided. Communes located in a particular valley did occasionally join together to form loose organizations or alliances. However, it was only with the Napoleonic conquests at the beginning of the 19th century that they were raised to the rank of cantons, and even later that they were linked together to form the Swiss Confederation. Even then, the central government has traditionally had relatively little power, partly because it is only elected for a year, and partly too because its political composition must reflect that of the parliament, which seriously limits the changes it can bring about.

Unfortunately this system of government cannot survive economic development, which necessarily involves abandoning local self-sufficiency and turning what were once self-governing communes into dormitory towns no longer capable of running themselves. Indeed, in recent times there has been a steady fall in the number of people who take part in the local assemblies, and whereas the power once resided with the communes, it is increasingly the Confederate Government and the large corporations that control the country's economic and social life.

Now that governments, by signing the GATT Uruguay Round and setting up the World Trade Organization, have delegated the task of running their economic affairs to what is in effect a World Government, decisions will be taken by a body of people that is still more distant from those who will be affected by them, that will be still more indifferent to the real interests of the people that a government is supposed to serve, and subservient to those of the transnational corporations that almost totally control it. In other words, we will have moved still further away from what alone can be regarded as true democracy.

For this reason alone, and there are many others, true democracy, in the form of government by a loose association of largely self-governing communities, is only possible if the economy is structured in the same way. Political localization requires economic localization [the corollary, of course, also being true], and the conduct of the economy is yet another function that has to be fulfilled primarily at the community level.

Self-sufficiency

Relative self-sufficiency is another pre-requisite of true democracy. Not surprisingly Jefferson considered that self-governing communities should be largely self-sufficient, at least that they should produce their own food, shelter and clothes. This was essential in order to foster the honesty, industry and perseverance on which democracy must be built. [7] Mahatma Gandhi fully agreed. The principle of "swadeshi", which was critical to his philosophy, .meant deriving one' s resources from one's own area, rather than importing them from elsewhere.

Professor Ray Dasmann of the University of California at Santa Cruz, says the same thing in a different way. He contrasts "ecosystem man" - who lives off his local ecosystem - with "biosphere man", who lives off the whole biosphere. For him it is only when we learn once more to become ecosystem people that our society become truly sustainable.

Traditional communities are well capable of living off the resources of their ecosystems in a highly sustainable manner, firstly because, unlike export-oriented corporations that overtax the land and move elsewhere when it ceases to be productive, they have no other land available to them. It is also because they have developed cultural patterns that enable them to do so. It should be obvious that people who have lived in the same place for hundreds of years must have developed those food-producing practices which enable them to make the optimum use of their resources, and also to make sure that these are applied. In other words, they alone are in possession of the requisite knowledge and capacities for living there.

Open-minded people who have studied agriculture as practised by local communities in traditional societies, have confirmed that this is so. This was certainly true of the agricultural experts sent out by the British government at the end of the nineteenth century to see how Indian farming methods could be improved. Both A.O.Hume [8] and John Augustus Voelcker [9] agreed that traditional Indian agriculture was perfectly adapted to local conditions and could not be improved on. To the dismay of the British authorities Voelcker even went so far as to say that it would be easier for him to suggest improvements to British than to Indian agriculture.

Even the World Bank, that has spearheaded the modernization of agriculture in the Third World, admitted in one of its more notorious reports that "Smallholders in Africa are outstanding managers of their own resources - their land and capital, fertiliser and water. [10] Why then modernize and push them into the slums? The answer is that it has to be, as the report fully admits - "for subsistence farming is incompatible with the development of the market", and the market of course has priority.

It is for this reason that the community is best seen - as it always has been among traditional societies - as made up not only of its human members but of the ecosystem with all the living things of which it is part. Wendell Berry sees the community in just this way. "If we speak of a healthy community", he writes, "we cannot be speaking of a community that is only human. We are talking about a neighbourhood of humans in a place, plus a place itself: the soil, the water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the non-human creatures that belong to it. What is more, it is only if this whole community is healthy "that its members can remain healthy and be healthy in body and mind and in a sustainable manner." (See Wendell Berry, chapter XXXXX) It follows that a human community should have exclusive access to the wealth provided by the ecosystem of which it is part, which, together with it, constitutes what Wendell Berry regards as a true community.

Once communities no longer have this largely exclusive use of their wealth; once it has been privatised and made available to all comers, in particular roving transnational corporations - a situation which superficially sounds highly desirable and very "democratic" - then its exploitation and rapid destruction becomes inevitable - and this is precisely what happens when we set up the global economy.

This brings us to what must perhaps be the most important argument of all for returning to the local community-based economy. If the world's environment is being degraded so rapidly, with a corresponding reduction in its capacity to sustain complex forms of life such as the human species, it is above all that it cannot sustain the present impact of our economic activities. To increase this impact still further, as we are doing by creating a global economy based on free trade, is both irresponsible and cynical. The only responsible policy must, on the contrary, be drastically to reduce this impact and it is only in the sort of economy that most of the contributors to this volume, propose, one in which economic activities are carried out on a far smaller scale and cater for a largely local or regional market, that we can hope to do so.

The great takeover can clearly not proceed indefinitely. Among other things it has already proceeded to the point where the State and the Corporations are rapidly becoming incapable of fulfilling the functions they have taken over from the family, the community, and the ecosystem, except on an increasingly insignificant scale. This is also true of the takeover of the functions previously fulfilled by ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole: - that of maintaining the necessary conditions for life on this planet.

For instance, if world climate is to be stabilized it will not be by the absurd geo-engineering works that some scientists have proposed, but by drastically reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and by equally drastically increasing the biosphere's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, which above all means allowing the world's badly depleted forests, its eroded soils and the beleaguered phytoplankton of its oceans, to recover, and this is only feasible if the impact of our activities on our environment is sufficiently reduced; in other words if the global economy is replaced by a localized economy with its vastly reduced energy and resource requirements.

Another key function, that the State in particular is no longer capable of assuming, is the provision of welfare to those in need. Even before the global economy was formally institutionalized, the cost of monetized welfare was in many industrial countries growing faster than GNP, and quite clearly could not be sustained for long. Today, however, in order to maximize competitiveness, the welfare state is being systematically, commodified, monetised, and provided to the minority that can afford it via the market system, even though the need for it is, at the same time, being dramatically increased as economic globalization increases the number of those in need.

Another key function that the State and Corporations are ever less capable of providing is the wherewithal for satisfying peoples' food and material needs, which in the modern world means jobs. That the global economy will be able to function with but a small fraction of its present work force and a still smaller fraction of that incomparably greater mass of marginalized people that will be looking for jobs in the cities in a matter of years, has been pointed out throughout this book. According to an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, in Paris (reference of article needed) the formal economy in the Ivory Coast will within a few years provide less than 6% of the jobs required, and that country's lot is probably not unique.

What is more, largely as a result of successive structural adjustment programmes (see Walden Bello, chapter XXXXX) the purchasing power of even those who still have jobs is being drastically reduced. This is increasingly the case in the industrial world where salaries are being slashed, long-term contracts replaced by short-term contracts, full-time work by part-time work, and men by women who are willing to work for less money. It goes without saying that people who have no jobs, and who no longer have access to welfare benefits, or who are paid slave wages, cannot buy many goods and services, while the computers, with which many of them will be replaced can buy none at all. What is more, as consumption falls, the formal economy will provide still less jobs, which will further reduce consumption and in turn further reduce the number of jobs it can provide. We will thus be caught up in a veritable chain-reaction that must continue until the formal economy ceases to be a significant source of jobs, food and other goods and services f or the bulk of humanity on this planet. In other words, by marginalizing so many people, the formal economy will marginalize itself.

All this implies that most people will be forced by necessity to learn to live outside the formal economy. In such a situation the LETS and Time Dollar schemes described in this book are not mere curiosities - initiatives that are on too small a scale to make any significant contribution to today's ever more daunting problems. On the contrary, they can provide the very foundations for the reconstruction of the local economies that alone can fill the void created by the growing irrelevance to people's lives of the formal economy.

In other words, as the corporations and the State become ever less capable of fulfilling the key functions that they originally took over from the largely non-monetized social economy, there will be no alternative but to allow the latter to reassume many of its original functions.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, our social economy is at present ill equipped to take on any new functions as the viable households and communities and ecosystems that previously fulfilled these functions have been seriously degraded under the impact of past economic development.

For this reason we should spare no effort in helping them, and this is not as vain a hope as it might seem. Indeed, if most people are to be marginalized and many of them rendered destitute by the global economy, they will not simply sit down quietly and starve. Many will undoubtedly revolt against the big corporations that use up their resources, pollute their land and rivers, produce food and consumer goods that only the elite can afford, and provide only a few high technology jobs that are filled by -specialists from abroad - which indeed they are already beginning to do.

The humiliation of the WTO at Seattle in November 1999 is undoubtedly the most significant sign of the fast developing reaction to the horrors of corporate domination - followed as it was by the demonstrations at Washington and the anti-globalization festival at Millau in March 2000 in which more than 50,000 people took part.

But many of those who have been marginalized are also bound to reorganize themselves and form local economies that in turn will provide the economic infrastructure for new local communities that can reassume the functions they have always fulfilled, functions that provide them with their very raison d'être. That this must necessarily occur is one of the bright lights on what is otherwise a dismally black horizon, but Wendell Berry sees another. For him the issue: the global versus the local economy, is likely to be the big issue of the next decade, and it should provide the basis of a new political realignment. The party of community, as he sees it, will have little money and hence little power, but its adherents can only increase, and soon it may well become the party of the majority. If such a party were really to come to power it would be in a position to develop and implement a coordinated strategy for ensuring a more painless transition to the sort of society and the sort of economy, which alone can offer our children any future on this beleaguered planet.

References

1	Robert Layton, 1995, "Functional and Historical Explanations of Village Social Organization in Northern Europe", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, December 1995.
2	David Korten, 1994 "Sustainable Livelihoods: Redefining the Global Social Crisis"..
3	Alexis de Tocqueville, 1981, "Democracy in America", Random House, New York..
4	Dan Coleman, 1994, "Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society", Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, quoted by Hultgren, op.cit..
5	Roger Boesche, 1987, "The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville", Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, quoted by John Hultgren, 1994, in "Democracy and Sustainability", unpublished manuscript..
6	Michael Herith, 1986, Alexis de Tocqueville, "Threat to Freedom and Democracy", Duke University, Durham, quoted by Hultgren, op.cit..
7	Daniel Kemmis, 1990, "Community and the Politics of Place", University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK..
8	A.O.Hume, 1878, "Agricultural Reform in India", W.H.Allen & Co., London..
9	John Augustus Voelcker, 1893, "Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture", Eyre and Spottiswoode, London..
10	The World Bank, 1981, "Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa", Washington DC..