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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Idea of a Local Economy part 1 by Wendell Berry
  • Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:19:24 -0600


paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many
accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of
topsoil – and the fact that it rains. -Anonymous
------------

The Idea of a Local Economy part 1 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 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
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 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 lifetime 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
don¹t 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.

(see part 2 next message)






  • [Livingontheland] The Idea of a Local Economy part 1 by Wendell Berry, TradingPostPaul, 06/13/2006

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