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Resurgence issue 206
Economics
GLOBAL PROBLEMS,
LOCAL SOLUTIONS
Wendell Berry
If governments fail to protect their citizens, then those citizens
must protect themselves by developing local economies.
May / June 2001
LET US BEGIN by assuming what appears to be true: that the so-called
"environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of
our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of
wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or
scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has
acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the
media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions.
This is good, of course; obviously, we can't hope to solve these
problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in
an age burdened with "publicity", we have to be aware also that as
issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of
oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary
in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature,
which is the result, in the first place, of gross oversimplification.
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 built our household on the assumption that the
natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed
increasingly over the last 500 years that nature is merely a supply
of "raw materials" and that we may safely possess those materials
merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have
increased, has involved ever less reverence or respect, less
gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of
land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate
natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the
methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more
technologically powerful and more brutal.
And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as
"environmental" problems without correcting the economic
oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now
either a matter of corporate behaviour, or of behaviour under the
influence of corporate behaviour. This is sufficiently clear to many
of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the
extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual
consumers, in the behaviour of the corporations.
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 danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the
solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - that
the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated
by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the
economic proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other
words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change
if they have altered their "values", or had a "change of heart", and
that such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate
changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives
to whom they have granted their proxies.
The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use
of nature must be practised, not by our proxy-holders, but by
ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only
another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. 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 have an
"environmental crisis" because 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.
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.
These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental
because they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there
is no justification, and because they issue a cold check on the
virtue of political and/or economic rulers. They seek, that is, to
preserve the gullibility of the people by appealing to a fund of
political virtue that does not exist.
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.
The fraudulence of these oligarchic forms of economy is in their
principle of displacing whatever good they recognize (as well as
their debts) from the present to the future. 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 both
communism and capitalism have found such principles to be a great
embarrassment. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good
thing in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient
to have people saying things like "Love thy neighbour as thyself" or
"Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them." Communists and
capitalists alike, "liberal" capitalists and "conservative"
capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of
determinism, so that they can say to their victims, "I'm doing this
because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable."
The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.
The idea of an economy based upon several kinds of ruin may seem a
contradiction in terms, but in fact such an economy is possible, as
we see. It is possible, however, on one implacable condition: the
only future good that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy
itself. And how does it disguise this outcome from its subjects, its
short-term beneficiaries, and its victims? It does so by false
accounting. It substitutes for the real economy, by which we build
and maintain (or do not maintain) our household, a symbolic economy
of money, which in the long run, because of the self-interested
manipulations of the "controlling interests", cannot symbolize or
account for anything but itself. 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.
THIS MORAL AND ECONOMIC absurdity exists for the sake of the
allegedly "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. The idea of the global "free market" is merely
capitalism's so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic
scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a
"right" within its presumptive territory. The global "free market" is
free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the
boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a
new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much
as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby
"freeing" the hounds.
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.
But the "free market" idea introduces into government a sanction of
an inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty:
namely that the "free market" is freest to those who have the most
money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money.
Wal-Mart, for example, as a large corporation "freely" competing
against local, privately owned businesses has virtually all the
freedom, and its small competitors virtually none.
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
- in the manner prescribed by the United States' Committee for
Economic Development after World War II - 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 - precisely the condition of
migrant farm workers in the United States.
To cause the land-using economies to overproduce is even simpler. The
farmers and other workers in the world's 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.
This sort of exploitation, long familiar in the foreign and domestic
economies and the colonialism of modern nations, has now become "the
global economy", which is the property of a few supranational
corporations. The economic theory used to justify the global economy
in its "free market" version is again perfectly groundless and
sentimental. The idea is that what is good for the corporations will
sooner or later - though not of course immediately - be good for
everybody.
That sentimentality is based in turn upon a fantasy: the proposition
that the great corporations, in "freely" competing with one another
for raw materials, labour, and market share, will drive each other
indefinitely, not only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture,
but also toward higher bids for raw materials and labour and lower
prices to consumers. As a result, all the world's people will be
economically secure - in the future. It would be hard to object to
such a proposition if only it were true.
But one knows, in the first place, that "efficiency" in manufacture
always means reducing labour costs by replacing workers with cheaper
workers or with machines.
In the second place, the "law of competition" does not imply that
many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is
a simple paradox: competition destroys competition. The law of
competition implies that many competitors, competing without
restraint, will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of
competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of
war.
In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap
long-distance transportation, without which it is not possible to
move goods from the point of cheapest origin to the point of highest
sale. And 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.
This idea of a global "free market" economy, despite its obvious
moral flaws and its dangerous practical weaknesses, is now the ruling
orthodoxy of the age. Its propaganda is subscribed to and distributed
by most political leaders, editorial writers, and other "opinion
makers". The powers that be, while continuing to budget huge sums for
"national defence", have apparently abandoned any idea of national or
local self-sufficiency, even in food. They also have given up the
idea that a national or local government might justly place
restraints upon economic activity in order to protect its land and
its people.
The global economy is now institutionalized in the World Trade
Organization, which was set up, without election anywhere, to rule
international trade on behalf of the "free market" - which is to say
on behalf of the supranational corporations - and to overrule, in
secret sessions, any national or regional law that conflicts with the
"free market". The corporate programme of global free trade and the
presence of the World Trade Organization have legitimized extreme
forms of expert thought. We are told confidently that if Kentucky
loses its milk-producing capacity to Wisconsin, that will be a
"success story". Experts such as Stephen C. Blank of the University
of California, Davis, have proposed that "developed" countries, such
as the United States and the United Kingdom, where food can no longer
be produced cheaply enough, should give up agriculture altogether.
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't 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.
Unsurprisingly, among people who wish to preserve things other than
money - for instance, every region's native capacity to produce
essential goods - there is a growing perception that the global "free
market" economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human
health and freedom, to industrial workers, and to farmers and others
in the land-use economies; and furthermore, that it is inherently an
enemy to good work and good economic practice.
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's or a region's 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's 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.
These assumptions clearly prefigure a condition of total economy. A
total economy is one in which everything - "life forms", for
instance, or the "right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a
price and is for sale. 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.
And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as
agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and
their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties
of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an
unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations,
communities, households, landscapes and ecosystems. It licenses
symbolic or artificial wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction
of the real wealth of all the world.
Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle
of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural
standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation
with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total
economy destroy the character and culture also from the inside.
In an essay on the origin of civilization in traditional cultures,
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote that "the principle of justice is the
same throughout Š [it is] that each member of the community should
perform the task for which he is fitted by nature. Š" The two ideas,
justice and vocation, are inseparable. That is why Coomaraswamy spoke
of industrialism as "the mammon of injustice", incompatible with
civilization. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation
that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus
possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to
pray."
AWARE OF INDUSTRIALISM'S potential for destruction, as well as the
considerable political danger of great concentrations of wealth and
power in industrial corporations, American leaders developed, and for
a while used, the means of limiting and restraining such
concentrations, and of somewhat equitably distributing wealth and
property. The means were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the
principle of collective bargaining, the concept of one-hundred per
cent parity between the land-using and the manufacturing economies,
and the progressive income tax. And to protect domestic producers and
production capacities it is possible for governments to impose
tariffs on cheap imported goods. These means are justified by the
government's obligation to protect the lives, livelihoods and
freedoms of its citizens. There is, then, no necessity or
inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the livelihoods
of our small farmers, small business people, and workers, along with
our domestic economic independence to the global "free market". But
now all of these means are either weakened or in disuse. The global
economy is intended as a means of subverting them.
In default of government protections against the total economy of the
supranational corporations, people are where they have been many
times before: in danger of losing their economic security and their
freedom, both at once. But at the same time the means of defending
themselves belongs to them in the form of a venerable principle:
powers not exercised by government return to the people. 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.
People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between
producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more
direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the
local community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer
economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of
local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local
economy to give consumers an influence over the kind and quality of
their food, and to preserve and enhance the local landscapes.
They want to give everybody in the local community a direct,
long-term interest in the prosperity, health and beauty of their
homeland. This is the only way presently available to make the total
economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make a
national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is
greater.
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's ignorance and
vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer,
one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where,
exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used
in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of
producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such
questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though
one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is
denied certain significant choices. 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.
Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in
this economy they can have no stewardly practice. 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.
And then, perhaps, one begins to see from a local point of view. One
begins to ask: What is here, what is in me, that can lead to
something better? From a local point of view, one can see that a
global "free market" economy is possible only if nations and
localities accept or ignore the inherent instability of a production
economy based on exports and a consumer economy based on imports. An
export economy is beyond local influence, and so too is an import
economy. And cheap long-distance transport is possible only if
granted cheap fuel, international peace, control of terrorism,
prevention of sabotage, and the solvency of the international economy.
Perhaps also one begins to see the difference between a small local
business that must share the fate of the local community and a large
absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local
community by ruining the local community.
SO FAR AS I can see, 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's 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".
Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the
colonies of Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: "Whenever the
timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region
because the villagers abandon their farms to fell as many trees as
possible." We should notice especially that the goal of production
was "as many Š as possible." And Schweitzer makes my point exactly:
"These people could achieve true wealth if they could develop their
agriculture and trade to meet their own needs." Instead they produced
timber for export to "the world economy", which made them dependent
upon imported goods that they bought with money earned from their
exports. They gave up their local means of subsistence, and imposed
the false standard of a foreign demand ("as many trees as possible")
upon their forests. They thus became helplessly dependent on an
economy over which they had no control.
Such was the fate of the native people under the African colonialism
of Schweitzer's time. Such is, and can only be, the fate of everybody
under the global colonialism of our time. Schweitzer's description of
the colonial economy of the Ogowe region is in principle not
different from the rural economy now in Kentucky or Iowa or Wyoming.
A total economy for all practical purposes is a total government. The
"free trade", which from the standpoint of the corporate economy
brings "unprecedented economic growth", from the standpoint of the
land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of
the cities, is destruction and slavery.
Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the
land no voice.
Reprinted from Orion (195 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230, USA).
Wendell Berry is a farmer, a poet and a novelist; his latest book,
Life is a Miracle, was reviewed in Resurgence 205.
from Resurgence issue 206
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