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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: nmgreens@yahoogroups.com, drmervyn@sltnet.lk
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Idea of a Local Economy, by Wendell Berry
  • Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 08:50:27 -0700


I have several links to Wendell's essay on our home page at
http://globalcircle.net . To me this is the most intelligently written
article on the subject.

The Idea of a Local Economy, by Wendell Berry
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/archive_om/Berry/Local_Economy.html


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 can¹t 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 Þrst 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
five hundred 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 always 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
behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. 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 behavior 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," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," 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 political and economic proxies.


The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of
nature must be practiced 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, traveling, 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 neighbor as thyself" or "Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to
save them." Communists and capitalists alike, "liberal" and "conservative"
capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of
determinism, so that they can say to their victims, "I am doing this because
I can¹t 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 program of industrial capitalism. The idea of the global "free
market" is merely capitalism¹s 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.


A corporation, essentially, is a pile
of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

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 labor 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 labor 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 labor-replacing
technology. In this way it is possible to maintain a "pool" of people who are
in the threatening 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 neighbors or to
neighboring towns and cities, but to large and remote corporations. There is
no competition among the buyers (supposing there is 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, labor, and marketshare, will drive each other indefinitely, not
only toward greater "efficiencies" of manufacture, but also toward higher
bids for raw materials and labor and lower prices to consumers. As a result,
all the world¹s 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 labor 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 on the "free market" 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 defense," 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 program of global
free trade and the presence of the World Trade Organization have legitimized
extreme forms of expertÔ




  • [Livingontheland] The Idea of a Local Economy, by Wendell Berry, Tradingpost, 11/11/2003

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