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...
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 equitable distributing wealth and property. The means
were: laws against trusts and monopolies, the principle of collective
bargaining, the concept of one-hundred-percent 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 or 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 land 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 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 one also 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: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood,
neighbors 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 neighborhood. 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 neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of
neighbors 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 labor 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 neighborhood 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 neighborhood
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...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.
--
Published in
Orion Magazine 2001
The Idea of a Local Economy by Wendell Berry
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