The community and democracy
If crime and other social aberrations can only be dealt with at a communal level, the same must be true of democratic government. If democracy is ‘government by the people for the people’, it is difficult to regard as truly democratic the sort of political system under which we live, in which individuals limit their contribution to governing themselves by voting only every five years for a candidate, over whose political conduct, until the next election, they have absolutely no control.
This is particularly the case today, when the corporate world has mastered the art of influencing the outcome of elections by massive and increasingly sophisticated public-relations campaigns and whose interests, rather than those of the people who elected them, governments everywhere have now come to represent.
If government is to be really ‘by the people’, then the people must themselves participate in the daily business of government and it is clearly not at the national, let alone at the global level, that they can possibly do so, but only at the local level among people who know each other, see each other regularly and see themselves as members of the same community.
Jefferson also always insisted that face-to-face participation in municipal government alone enables citizens to subordinate what they take to be their immediate personal interests to the public good. He advocated that states should be broken up into local wards of such a size as to enable the full interaction and participation of citizens in their own government. [Coleman, 1994] De Tocqueville, like the ancient Greeks,
“identified freedom with self-determination, and saw democracy as fostering freedom, precisely because it enabled people to participate in municipal government.” [Boesche, 1987, quoted by Hultgren, 1994.]
He also noted how, in the New England town, democracies where such conditions were largely met,
“each person’s co-operation in its affairs assures his attachment to its interests; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambitions and his future exertions.” [Herith, l986, quoted by Hultgren, 1994.]
The Swiss system of government may also provide a model. It has always been based on the commune or gemeinde, which is largely autonomous and self-governing. Traditionally, it decides what taxes should be paid and how the community should spend the money allocated to it. It also actively oversees the communal administration, whose proposals and expenditures it can reject, and deals with such issues as public service, primary education, local police and welfare for the poor and the sick. Really important decisions are made by a free assembly of the citizens.
Significantly, the commune existed long before the cantons into which the confederation is now divided. Communes located in a particular valley did occasionally join together to form loose organisations or alliances. However, it was only with the Napoleonic conquests at the beginning of the 19th century that they were raised to the rank of cantons and even later that they were linked together to form the Swiss confederation. Even then, the central government has traditionally had relatively little power, partly because it is only elected for a year and partly too because its political composition must reflect that of the parliament, which seriously limits the changes it can bring about.
Unfortunately, this system of government cannot survive economic development, which necessarily involves abandoning local self-sufficiency and turning what were once self-governing communes into dormitory towns no longer capable of running themselves. Indeed, in recent times there has been a steady fall in the number of people who take part in local assemblies and whereas the power once resided with the communes, it is increasingly the confederate government and the large corporations that control the country’s economic and social life.
Now that governments, by signing the GATT Uruguay Round and setting up the WTO, have delegated the task of running their economic affairs to what is, in effect, a world government, decisions will be taken by a body of people who remain distanced from those affected, who are indifferent to the real interests of the common people and who are subservient to the interests of transnational corporations. In other words, we will have moved still further away from true democracy.
For this reason alone, and there are many others, true democracy – in the form of government by a loose association of largely self-governing communities – is only possible if the economy is structured in the same way. Political localisation requires economic localisation (the corollary, of course, also being true), and the conduct of the economy is yet another function that has to be fulfilled primarily at the community level.
Back to topSelf-sufficiency
Relative self-sufficiency is another prerequisite of true democracy. Not surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson considered that self-governing communities should be largely self-sufficient and that they should at least produce their own food, shelter and clothes. This was essential in order to foster the honesty, industry and perseverance on which democracy must be built. [Kemmis, 1990] Mahatma Gandhi fully agreed. The principle of swadeshi, which was critical to his philosophy, meant deriving one’s resources from ones own area, rather than importing them from elsewhere.
Professor Ray Dasmann of the University of California at Santa Cruz says the same thing in a different way. He contrasts “ecosystem man” – who lives off his local ecosystem – with “biosphere man” – who lives off the whole biosphere. For him, it is only when we learn once more to become ecosystem people that our society is truly sustainable.
Traditional communities are well capable of living off the resources of their ecosystems in a highly sustainable manner. Unlike export-orientated corporations that overtax the land and move elsewhere when it ceases to be productive, traditional communities have no other land available to them.
Furthermore, they have developed cultural patterns that enable them to do so. It should be obvious that people who have lived in the same place for hundreds of years must have developed food-producing practices which enable them to make the optimum use of their resources and also to make sure that these are applied. In other words, they alone are in possession of the requisite knowledge and capacities for living there.
Open-minded people who have studied agriculture as practised by local communities in traditional societies have confirmed that this is so. This was certainly true of the agricultural experts sent out by the British government at the end of the 19th century to see how Indian farming methods could be improved.
Both A. 0. Hume and John Augustus Voelcker agreed that traditional Indian agriculture was perfectly adapted to local conditions and could not be improved upon. [Hume, 1878; Voelcker, 1893.] To the dismay of the British authorities, Voelcker even went so far as to say that it would be easier for him to suggest improvements to British than to Indian agriculture.
Even the World Bank, which has spearheaded the modernisation of agriculture in the developing world, admitted in one of its more notorious reports that
“smallholders in Africa are outstanding managers of their own resources – their land and capital, fertiliser and water.” [The World Bank, 1981]
Why then modernise and push them into the slums? The answer is that it has to be as the report fully admits, because
“subsistence farming is incompatible with the development of the market.”
And the market, of course, has priority. It is for this reason that the community is best seen – as it always has been among traditional societies – as comprising not only its human members but the ecosystem with all the living things of which it is part. Wendell Berry sees the community in just this way:
“If we speak of a healthy community, we cannot be speaking of a community that is only human. We are talking about a neighbourhood of humans in a place, plus a place itself: the soil, the water, its air and all the families and tribes of the non-human creatures that belong to it.”
What is more, it is only if this whole community is healthy “that its members can remain healthy and be healthy in body and mind and in a sustainable manner”. [see Chapter 22] It follows that a human community should have exclusive access to the wealth provided by the ecosystem of which it is part. Together, both constitute what Wendell Berry regards as a true community.
Once communities no longer have this largely exclusive use of their wealth, once they have been privatised and made available to all comers, in particular roving TNCs – a situation which superficially sounds highly desirable and very ‘democratic’ – then their exploitation and rapid destruction become inevitable. This is precisely what happens when we set up the global economy.
This brings us to what must, perhaps, be the most important argument of all for returning to the local community-based economy. If the world’s environment is being degraded so rapidly, with a corresponding reduction in its capacity to sustain complex forms of life such as the human species, then it cannot sustain the present impact of our economic activities.
To increase this impact still further, as we are doing by creating a global economy based on free trade, is both irresponsible and cynical. The only responsible policy must be to reduce, drastically, this impact. It is only in the sort of economy that most of the contributors to this book propose, one in which economic activities are carried out on a far smaller scale and cater for a largely local or regional market, that we can hope to do so.
The great takeover can clearly not proceed indefinitely. Already, the state and the corporations are rapidly becoming incapable of fulfilling the functions they have taken over from the family, the community and the ecosystem, except on an increasingly insignificant scale. This is also true of the take-over of the functions previously fulfilled by the Earth’s ecosystems and biosphere, whose roles are to maintain the necessary condition for life on this planet.
For instance, if world climate is to be stabilised it will not be by the absurd geo-engineering works that some scientists have proposed but by drastically reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and by equally drastically increasing the biosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. This means allowing the world’s badly depleted forests, its eroded soils and the beleaguered phytoplankton of its oceans, to recover, which is only feasible if the impact of our activities on our environment is sufficiently reduced. In other words, the global economy must be replaced by a localised economy with its vastly reduced energy and resource requirements.
Another essential function that the state, in particular, is no longer capable of assuming is the provision of welfare to those in need. Even before the global economy was formally institutionalised, the cost of monetised welfare was, in many industrial countries, growing faster than GNP and quite clearly could not be sustained for long. Today, however, in order to maximise competitiveness, the welfare state is being systematically commodified, monetised and provided to the minority that can afford it, via the market system, even though the need for it is dramatically increasing as economic globalisation increases the number of those in need.
Yet another key function that the state and corporations are ever less capable of fulfilling is the provision of the means to satisfy people’s food and material requirements, which, in the modern world, necessitates jobs. That the global economy will be able to function with but a small fraction of its present work force and a still smaller fraction of that incomparably greater mass of marginalised people who will be looking for jobs in a matter of years, has been pointed out throughout this book. According to an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, the formal economy in the Ivory Coast will, within a few years, provide less than 6 percent of the jobs required; and that country’s lot is probably not unique.
What is more, largely as a result of successive structural adjustment programmes, [see Chapter 10] the purchasing power of those individuals who still have jobs is being drastically reduced. This is increasingly the case in the industrial world, where salaries are being slashed, long-term contracts replaced by short-term contracts, full-time work replaced by part-time work and men replaced by women who are willing to work for less money.
It goes without saying that people who have no jobs, and who no longer have access to welfare benefits, or who are paid slave wages, cannot buy many goods and services, while the computers – with which many of them will be replaced – can buy none at all. Then as consumption falls, the formal economy will provide still fewer jobs, which will further reduce consumption and, in turn, further reduce the number of jobs it can provide.
We will thus be caught up in a veritable chain reaction that must continue until the formal economy ceases to be a significant source of jobs, food and other goods and services for the bulk of humanity on this planet. In other words, by marginalising so many people, the formal economy will marginalise itself.
All this implies that most people will be forced by necessity to learn to live outside the formal economy. In such a situation the LETS and Time Dollar schemes described in this article are not mere curiosities – initiatives that are on too small a scale to make any significant contribution to today’s ever more daunting problems. On he contrary, they can provide the very foundations for reconstructing the local economies that alone can fill the void created by the growing irrelevance of the formal economy to people’s lives.
In other words, as the corporations and the state become less capable of fulfilling the key functions that they originally took over from the largely non-monetised social economy, there will be no alternative but to allow the latter to reassume many of its original functions.
Unfortunately, our social economy is, at present, ill equipped to take on any new functions since the viable households and communities and ecosystems that previously fulfilled these functions have been seriously degraded under the impact of past economic development.
For this reason we should spare no effort in helping them. Furthermore, if most people are to he marginalised and many of them rendered destitute by the global economy, they will not simply sit down quietly and starve. Many will undoubtedly revolt against the big corporations that use up their resources, pollute their land and rivers, produce food and consumer goods that only the élite can afford, and provide only a few high-technology jobs that are filled by specialists from abroad.
The humiliation of the WTO at Seattle in November 1999 is undoubtedly the most significant sign of the world’s reaction to the horrors of corporate domination – followed by the demonstrations at Washington and the anti-globalisation festival at Millau in March 2000, in which more than 50,000 people took part.
But many of those who hive been marginalised are also bound to reorganise themselves and form local economies that, in turn, will provide the economic infrastructure for new local communities. These communities will resume the functions they have always fulfilled, functions that provide them with their very raison d’être.
That this must necessarily occur is one of the bright lights on what is otherwise a dismally black horizon but Wendell Berry sees another. For him the issue of global versus local economy is likely to be of major significance in the next decade and it should provide the basis of a new political realignment. The party of community, as he sees it, will have little money and hence little power but its adherents can only increase and soon it may well become the party of the majority.
If such a party were really to come to power it would be in a position to develop and implement a co-ordinated strategy for ensuring a more painless transition to the sort of society and the sort of economy which alone can offer our children any future on this beleaguered planet.
Back to topReferences
| 1 | Robert Layton, 1995, “Functional and Historical Explanations of Village Social Organization in Northern Europe”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, December 1995. |
| 2 | David Korten, 1994 “Sustainable Livelihoods: Redefining the Global Social Crisis”.. |
| 3 | Alexis de Tocqueville, 1981, “Democracy in America”, Random House, New York.. |
| 4 | Dan Coleman, 1994, “Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society”, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, quoted by Hultgren, op.cit.. |
| 5 | Roger Boesche, 1987, “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville”, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, quoted by John Hultgren, 1994, in “Democracy and Sustainability”, unpublished manuscript.. |
| 6 | Michael Herith, 1986, Alexis de Tocqueville, “Threat to Freedom and Democracy”, Duke University, Durham, quoted by Hultgren, op.cit.. |
| 7 | Daniel Kemmis, 1990, “Community and the Politics of Place”, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK.. |
| 8 | A.O.Hume, 1878, “Agricultural Reform in India”, W.H.Allen & Co., London.. |
| 9 | John Augustus Voelcker, 1893, “Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture”, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London.. |
| 10 | The World Bank, 1981, “Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa”, Washington DC.. |
Leave a Comment