Global Problems, Local Solutions – Relocalization as the Antidote for the Fallacy of Conventional Political Economy by Wendell Berry

“The “environmental crisis” has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature . . . . we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, travelling and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world.”

“A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes and ecosystems . . . . In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes – and especially democratic processes – are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale.”

“If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves . . . . How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy – something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy.”

“. . . . the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighbourhood and subsistence . . . . In a viable neighbourhood, neighbours ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford . . . . everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighbourhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbours who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met . . . it refuse to import goods that are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.”

Full article at Resurgence Magazine

Keywords : globalization, free trade, free market, capitalism, corporation, economic system, nature, ecosocial crisis, relocalization, community, community entrepreneurship, institutional diversity, policentricity, work, vocation, food, agriculture, self-reliance, self-organization, self-governance, subsistence economy, democracy, participatory democracy
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“The “environmental crisis” has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature . . . . we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, travelling and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world.”

“What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the “developed” world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of “service” that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities. Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others.”

“The “environmental crisis”, in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the “environmental crisis” is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens.”

“We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of “the many” who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present. Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the “free market” and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to “the many” – in, of course, the future . . . . Communism and “free-market” capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely “the greatest good of the greatest number” or “the benefit of the many” – and keep it at a distance.”

“Their success depends upon persuading people, first, that whatever they have now is no good, and, second, that the promised good is certain to be achieved in the future. This obviously contradicts the principle – common, I believe, to all the religious traditions – that if ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now; we are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future . . . . And so we have before us the spectacle of unprecedented “prosperity” and “economic growth” in a land of degraded farms, forests, ecosystems and watersheds, polluted air, failing families and perishing communities . . . . the only future good that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy itself.”

“. . . . “free” market, the single principle of which is this: commodities will be produced wherever they can be produced at the lowest cost, and consumed wherever they will bring the highest price. To make too cheap and sell too high has always been the programme of industrial capitalism . . . . To make too cheap and sell too high, there are two requirements. One is that you must have a lot of consumers with surplus money and unlimited wants. For the time being, there are plenty of these consumers in the “developed” countries. The problem, for the time being easily solved, is simply to keep them relatively affluent and dependent on purchased supplies . . . . The other requirement is that the market for labour and raw materials should remain depressed relative to the market for retail commodities. This means that the supply of workers should exceed demand, and that the land-using economy should be allowed or encouraged to overproduce.”

To keep the cost of labour low, it is necessary first to entice or force country people everywhere in the world to move into the cities, and second, to continue to introduce labour-replacing technology. In this way it is possible to maintain a “pool” of people who are in the threatful position of being mere consumers, landless and also poor, and who therefore are eager to go to work for low wages

To cause the land-using economies to overproduce is even simpler. The farmers and other workers in the world?fs land-using economies, by and large, are not organized. They are therefore unable to control production in order to secure just prices. Individual producers must go individually to the market and take for their produce simply whatever they are paid. They have no power to bargain or make demands. Increasingly, they must sell, not to neighbours or to neighbouring towns and cities, but to large and remote corporations. There is no competition among the buyers (supposing there are more than one), who are organized, and are “free” to exploit the advantage of low prices. Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to make up their losses “on volume”, and overproduction inevitably makes for low prices. The land-using economies thus spiral downward as the money economy of the exploiters spirals upward. If economic attrition in the land-using population becomes so severe as to threaten production, then governments can subsidize production without production controls, which necessarily will encourage overproduction, which will lower prices ? and so the subsidy to rural producers becomes, in effect, a subsidy to the purchasing corporations. In the land-using economies production is further cheapened by destroying, with low prices and low standards of quality, the cultural imperatives for good work and land stewardship.

I believe that this perception is correct and that it can be shown to be correct merely by listing the assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be “free” to buy low and sell high in the world at large. These assumptions, so far as I can make them out, are as follows:

1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places and things do not matter and are of no worth.
2. That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns.
3. That there is no conflict between the “free market” and political freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy.
4. That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice.
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
7. That the loss or destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost.
8. That it is all right for a nation?fs or a region?fs subsistence to be foreign-based, dependent on long-distance transport, and entirely controlled by corporations.
9. That, therefore, wars over commodities – our recent Gulf War, for example – are legitimate and permanent economic functions.
10. That this sort of sanctioned violence is justified also by the predominance of centralized systems of production supply, communications and transportation which are extremely vulnerable not only to acts of war between nations, but also to sabotage and terrorism.
11. That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries.
12. That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade.
13. That an economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one?fs natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.

A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes and ecosystems . . . . In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes – and especially democratic processes – are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale.

The “right” of a corporation to exercise its economic power without restraint is construed, by the partisans of the “free market”, as a form of freedom, a political liberty implied presumably by the right of individual citizens to own and use property . . . . The idea is that what is good for the corporations will sooner or later – though not of course immediately – be good for everybody.

“. . . . cheap long-distance transportation is the basis of the idea that regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic self-sufficiency in order to specialize in production for export of the few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply produced. Whatever may be said for the “efficiency” of such a system, its result (and, I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence.

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person”. But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetimes of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who “let their money work for them,” expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super government with the power to overrule nations.

I don?ft mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy.

If the government does not propose to protect the lives, livelihoods and freedoms of its people, then the people must think about protecting themselves . . . . How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy ? something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy.

I am assuming that there is a valid line of thought leading from the idea of the total economy to the idea of a local economy. I assume that the first thought may be a recognition of one?fs ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy . . . . In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better . . . . To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighbourhood and subsistence.

In a viable neighbourhood, neighbours ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighbourhood. This practice must be in part charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.

Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighbourhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbours who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community?fs subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labour and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally. In charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. This principle applies not just to localities, but to regions and nations as well.

The principles of neighbourhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as “protectionism” ? and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighbourhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not “isolationism”.

Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.