The last word - 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 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, it can only lead for most of humanity 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 been taught that economic development, measured by an ever-increasing GNP, is the key to world prosperity and human well being. Hence, all possible efforts must be made to maximise GNP, 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 more 'efficient' corporations that cater for an ever bigger and 'freer' market.

However, this is precisely what we have been doing in the last 50 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 (TNCs) catering for an ever expanding world market.

World GNP, as a result, has increased by sixfold and world trade by twelvefold. 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 trans-national corporations 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.

If we are really to solve these problems, as in their hearts, most people must clearly realise, 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 create a diversity of loosely linked, community-based economies, managed by much smaller companies that cater above all (though clearly not exclusively) for local or regional markets. In other words, it is not economic globalisation that we should aim for but economic localisation.

In saying this, I am, in effect, calling for a reversal of economic globalisation and indeed of the very process of economic development, of which globalisation 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 existed. 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 globalisation, 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 percent 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 by 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 ensured 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 US as late as 1890, even those families living in highly industrialised regions, such as 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 Tocqueville in his Democracy in America; in parts of eastern France and in Switzerland, communities to a large extent still are self-governing today. [Layton, 1995]

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. As Korten says,

"the very conduct of these activities serves to maintain the social bonds of trust and obligation, the 'social capital' of the community." [Korten, 1994]

Korten also notes that

"a considerable proportion of economic growth in recent decades is simply a result of shifting functions from the social economy, where they are not counted in GNP, to the market economy, where they are."

He might have added that this is what economic growth or development is all about. Thus, as it proceeds, food and clothes now have to be bought, the young are brought up in crèches, schools and universities, and which under the new regulations of the GATS are now to be privatised; the old and the sick are looked after in special homes and hospitals which are also now to be privatised; and so on.

In this way, all these and other critical functions are disembedded from their natural social context, commodified and increasingly privatised, and hence ever less available to the poor and the needy. In addition, in such conditions, the family and the community, stripped of their natural functions, can only atrophy and we get an atomised society made up of socially deprived and increasingly alienated people whose only remaining functions are to produce and consume.

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 lives of all other living things have 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 which are now on such a scale that the stability of world climate is overwhelmingly threatened, the Earth's natural functions should be undertaken by vast geo-engineering schemes. Foremost among these schemes is a plan to site 50,000 100 square kilometre mirrors in space in order to reflect away the heat of the sun and keep the planet cool.

In other words, economic development is therefore 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 a shift away from 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. It also signals the demise of the 'great economy' which must become ever less capable of fulfilling its 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 been the extended family and included people who lived in the same household, though not necessarily blood relations. This is in contrast to the truncated nuclear family of the type we have today. What is more, the family of the past formed an integral part of the community within which all its members lived and worked - and into which it practically merged, rather than existing as an island of solidarity in a vast indifferent non-society, as it does today.

For this and similar reasons we should 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 a basic, one might say natural, unit of social organisation - 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 but the community seems to have sprung from the hand of God." [A. de Tocqueville, 1981.]

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 worldview, 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 lives they lead within their family groups have meaning to them - which is ever less the case of the lives led by most people in the cities of the industrial world today.

In a traditional community, social order is also effectively maintained by an extremely powerful force: that of public opinion, reflecting traditional values -and crime and other social aberrations are reduced to a minimum.

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 us all sorts of obligations to our 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 marginalises 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. Much the same can be said for the other serious problems that confront our modern society such as poverty, malnutrition, the annihilation our natural resources, the population explosion and so on.

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 by voting only 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 the people 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. [Coleman, 1994] 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." [Boesche, 1987, quoted by Hultgren, 1994.]

He also noted how, in the New England town, democracies where such conditions were largely met,

"each person's co-operation 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." [Herith, l986, quoted by Hultgren, 1994.]

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 organisations 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 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 WTO, 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 who remain distanced from those affected, who are indifferent to the real interests of the common people and who are subservient to the interests of transnational corporations. In other words, we will have moved still further away from 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 localisation requires economic localisation (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 prerequisite of true democracy. Not surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson considered that self-governing communities should be largely self-sufficient and that they should at least 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. [Kemmis, 1990] Mahatma Gandhi fully agreed. The principle of swadeshi, which was critical to his philosophy, meant deriving one's resources from ones 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 is truly sustainable.

Traditional communities are well capable of living off the resources of their ecosystems in a highly sustainable manner. Unlike export-orientated corporations that overtax the land and move elsewhere when it ceases to be productive, traditional communities have no other land available to them.

Furthermore, 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 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 19th century to see how Indian farming methods could be improved.

Both A. 0. Hume and John Augustus Voelcker agreed that traditional Indian agriculture was perfectly adapted to local conditions and could not be improved upon. [Hume, 1878; Voelcker, 1893.] 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, which has spearheaded the modernisation of agriculture in the developing 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." [The World Bank, 1981]

Why then modernise and push them into the slums? The answer is that it has to be as the report fully admits, because

"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 comprising not only its human members but 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, 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 Chapter 22] It follows that a human community should have exclusive access to the wealth provided by the ecosystem of which it is part. Together, both constitute what Wendell Berry regards as a true community.

Once communities no longer have this largely exclusive use of their wealth, once they have been privatised and made available to all comers, in particular roving TNCs - a situation which superficially sounds highly desirable and very 'democratic' - then their exploitation and rapid destruction become inevitable. 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, then 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 be to reduce, drastically, this impact. It is only in the sort of economy that most of the contributors to this book 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 take-over can clearly not proceed indefinitely. Already, 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 take-over of the functions previously fulfilled by the Earth's ecosystems and biosphere, whose roles are to maintain the necessary condition for life on this planet.

For instance, if world climate is to be stabilised 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. This means allowing the world's badly depleted forests, its eroded soils and the beleaguered phytoplankton of its oceans, to recover, which is only feasible if the impact of our activities on our environment is sufficiently reduced. In other words, the global economy must be replaced by a localised economy with its vastly reduced energy and resource requirements.

Another essential 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 institutionalised, the cost of monetised welfare was, in many industrial countries, growing faster than GNP and quite clearly could not be sustained for long. Today, however, in order to maximise 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 dramatically increasing as economic globalisation increases the number of those in need.

Yet another key function that the state and corporations are ever less capable of fulfilling is the provision of the means to satisfy people's food and material requirements, which, in the modern world, necessitates 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 marginalised people who will be looking for jobs in a matter of years, has been pointed out throughout this book. According to an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, the formal economy in the Ivory Coast will, within a few years, provide less than 6 percent 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 Chapter 10] the purchasing power of those individuals 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 replaced by part-time work and men replaced 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. Then as consumption falls, the formal economy will provide still fewer 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 for the bulk of humanity on this planet. In other words, by marginalising so many people, the formal economy will marginalise 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 article 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 he contrary, they can provide the very foundations for reconstructing the local economies that alone can fill the void created by the growing irrelevance of the formal economy to people's lives.

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

Unfortunately, our social economy is, at present, ill equipped to take on any new functions since 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. Furthermore, if most people are to he marginalised 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 élite can afford, and provide only a few high-technology jobs that are filled by specialists from abroad.

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

But many of those who hive been marginalised are also bound to reorganise themselves and form local economies that, in turn, will provide the economic infrastructure for new local communities. These communities will resume 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 of global versus local economy is likely to be of major significance in 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 co-ordinated 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.