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Sunday, November 19, 2006

The idea of a Local Economy

The Idea of a Local Economy
by Wendell Berry

LET US BEGIN BY ASSUMING what appears to be true: that the so-called
scientific, academic, and religious institutions.

This is good, of course; obviously, we can¹t hope to solve these
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
household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed
increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a
have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less
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.

"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
of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual
consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or
governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of
were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or
delegate the practice to others.

solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - 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.

of nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves.
pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The
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

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
miserable in the present.

Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism
as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism
"free market" and the great corporations, which will bring

These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental
because they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there
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
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
This obviously contradicts the principle - common, I believe, to all
the religious traditions - that if ever we are going to do good to one
presently occupied in destroying every good thing in sight in order to
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.

see. It is possible however, on one implacable condition: the only
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
and perishing communities.

THIS MORAL AND ECONOMIC ABSURDITY exists for the sake of the allegedly
and sell too high has always been the program of industrial capitalism.
The idea of the global "free market" is merely capitalism¹s
corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old
national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without

A corporation, essentially, is a pile

restraint is construed, by the partisans of the "free market," as a
individual citizens to own and use property.

inequality that is not implicit in any idea of democratic liberty:
against local, privately owned businesses has virtually all the
freedom, and its small competitors virtually none.

is simply to keep them relatively affluent and dependent on purchased

The other requirement is that the market for labor and raw materials
should remain depressed relative to the market for retail commodities.

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
"pool" of people who are in the threatening position of being mere
work for low wages - precisely the condition of migrant farm workers in
the United States.

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
Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to make up
their losses "on volume," and overproduction inevitably makes for low
economy of the exploiters spirals upward. If economic attrition in the
governments can subsidize production without production controls, which
necessarily will encourage overproduction, which will lower prices -
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
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

That sentimentality is based in turn, upon a fantasy: the proposition
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.

always means reducing labor costs by replacing workers with cheaper
workers or with machines.

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

In the third place, the global economy is based upon cheap
regions and nations should abandon any measure of economic
few commodities or the single commodity that can be most cheaply
its result (and I assume, its purpose) is to destroy local production
capacities, local diversity, and local economic independence.

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
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
international trade on behalf of the "free market" - which is to say on
behalf of the supranational corporations - and to overrule, in secret
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,
cheaply enough, should give up agriculture altogether.

a corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person." But the
limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because
lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It
The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who "let their money
of a super government with the power to overrule nations. I don¹t mean
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
to good work and good economic practice. I believe that this perception
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
3. That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political
freedom, and no connection between political democracy and economic
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
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
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
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
that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work
one's natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is
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
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
the real wealth of all the world.

vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural
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,
throughout...[it is] that each member of the community should perform
the task for which he is fitted by nature..." The two ideas, justice
and vocation, are inseparable. That is why Coomaraswamy spoke of
industrialism as "the mammon of injustice," incompatible with
possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to

A viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up
of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

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
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
necessity or inevitability requiring our government to sacrifice the
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
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.

producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more
local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm
and to preserve and enhance the local landscapes. They want to give
prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the only way
total. But now the necessity is greater.

the first thought may be a recognition of one's ignorance and
in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of
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
totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

begins to ask, What is here, what is in me, that can lead to something
market" economy is possible only if nations and localities accept or
ignore the inherent instability of a production economy based on
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
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,
nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be,

protects its own production capacities. It does not import products
community are understood either as belonging to the community's
producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use
cheaper labor and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity
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
producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local
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

Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies
good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers
notice especially that the goal of production was "as
achieve true wealth if they could develop their agriculture and trade
"the world economy," which made them dependent upon imported goods that
became helplessly dependent on an economy over which they had no

Schweitzer¹s 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
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.

Wendell Berry's poems, essays, and works of fiction have won him
numerous honors and a wide following. His latest collection of poems is
titled Given. He lives and farms in his native Kentucky.

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