A Response to The Article on Substack by Ravi Login called the World is Becoming a Company Town
This week’s reflection begins with a quiet image, a young boy rowing across Gamble Bay toward the town of Port Gamble. What unfolds is not simply nostalgia, but a powerful metaphor. Port Gamble was a company town, where one entity controlled not only the economy but the shape of daily life. What this piece helps us see is that this model did not stay small. It scaled. And now, the world is becoming a company town.
The comparison is not just poetic. It is precise. A company town centralizes power. It makes all decisions about jobs, resources, infrastructure, and even education or healthcare from a singular vantage point focused on profit. When that model expands globally, we end up with metacorporations that operate above the reach of local communities, shaping economies, governments, and ecosystems alike.
This post challenges us to see what has been quietly normalized. Corporations now write legislation, fund campaigns, run schools, manage prisons, and privatize essential services. The commons has been enclosed, not only in land but in governance. And in the process, local autonomy has eroded.
But this is not just a political or economic concern. It is also a spiritual one. As the author reminds us, spiritual life depends on connection, on meaning, on relationships, on rootedness. When people lose control over the terms of their lives, when the drive to survive leaves no space to reflect, create, or feel joy, the human spirit suffers.
This is the deeper consequence of living in a global company town. It is not just inequality or environmental damage, though those are real. It is the quiet loss of something essential. Our ability to shape our collective life. Our ability to experience freedom, connection, and care.
The vision offered here is not only a critique. It is also a way forward. The five principles of economic localization speak to what many people already feel, an urgent need to return decision-making power to communities, to keep resources local, to organize production around needs rather than profit. These principles, drawn from the work of P. R. Sarkar, offer a grounded framework for decentralizing economic power while nurturing human and ecological well-being.
This is not about isolationism or nostalgia. It is about building economies that are resilient, participatory, and alive. There is something profoundly hopeful in the idea that the path forward is not grand and abstract, but rooted in local soil, guided by local voices, and centered on what it means to be human.
This is not a vision confined to one ideology or identity. A call for economic decentralization has the potential to unite people across political and cultural divides. While the metacorporations may resist it, the common people, whether they speak from the language of justice, tradition, or survival, are ready for something different. In turning away from the global company town, we open space for diverse cultures to flourish, for ecosystems to be protected, and for the human spirit to rise from under the weight of extraction and control. The path forward will take courage, but it is the only path that honors both the earth and each other.
If you have not yet read the full post, The World is Becoming a Company Town, I encourage you to do so. It is a clear call to reclaim what has been taken, not only land and labor, but dignity, purpose, and the future itself.