An article by Ravi Login on the Crisis and Transition Substack.
When I was a young boy my family bought an undeveloped two-acre property on the shore of Gamble Bay, located near the mouth of Hood Canal in Washington State. My grandfather made us a small rowboat, and I would sometimes row the two miles to the mouth of the bay, where the town of Port Gamble and the Pope and Talbot lumber mill were located.
Port Gamble is considered to be America’s best preserved lumber town, for which it’s been designated a National Historic Landmark. It’s an immensely charming town; all of the houses and buildings were constructed in the 1800s in a classic New England architectural style.
For most of its history, Port Gamble was also a company town. In a company town all property, services, and enterprises are owned by a single company. In a company town, it is the company that hires, fires, and retires the workers. It is the company that runs the store where people get their commodities and that controls the water and the electricity systems. The company runs the school and the medical clinic. The company owns the homes that workers rent. And it’s the company that brings in the hired security when workers try to organize unions.
It strikes me that the running of a company town follows the same logic as the running of the present global economy. In the global economy who provides the jobs; who outsources the jobs? Who owns the resources, and who plunders the resources? Who decides what factories get built — and then decides when they get moved and where? Who runs the hospitals; who controls the energy grid, the media, the banks? Is it not an increasingly small number of transnational conglomerates?
A Company Town Writ Large
Under the dominance of these globe spanning conglomerates the world is becoming a company town writ large. Transnational corporations thrust themselves into every sphere of life — including those which were once within the purview of civil society or of the government. They now run prisons. They take over municipal water supplies. They privatize education. They manage military logistics.
They also thrust themselves into political life. The agents of transnational corporations draft legislation for politicians to legislate. Government appointees come from the ranks of corporate executives, or from corporate lobbies or councils. Campaign funding for political candidates is dominated by corporate money.
The world is becoming a company town. The power once vested in local communities to decide their destinies, to shape their collective life, is being usurped by planet-spanning metacorporations (i.e., corporations composed of many subsidiary corporations).
What Happens When the Resources Play Out?
In a company town, when the coal plays out, when the timber is all cut, what happens to the company? What happens to the town? And what happens to the mill tailings, to the ruined forests? In a company town, what responsibility does the company take for the future well-being of the workers, or of the land?
In a similar manner, what responsibility do the metacorporations take for the well-being of communities, cultures, and families? Or of the non-human species, of the ecosystems? What care do they take to maintain the purity of the water and the air? Except under pressure of regulations or public protest, what do they do in the service of life? Damn little. Their allegiance is to their profits.
Why, then, should humanity cast its future with the global company town?
Oppressive to the Spiritual Life of Humanity
I am not an erudite social commentator; I’m no Thom Hartmann, Heather Cox Richardson or Robert Reich. There’s much about social life I’m not qualified to comment on. My main role is as a spiritual teacher. Spirituality is that which uplifts the human spirit; it is that which gives us a vibrant connection to all life, to all beings. Spirituality speaks to the deep desires of human beings to feel joy, to feel connected in love.
As a spiritual teacher, I can’t help but be aware that in the global economy spiritual life is impoverished. And without spiritual life, the essence of our humanity gets repressed and goes unexpressed. This is too steep a price to pay for a paycheck.
But it’s also the case that without a paycheck to acquire our basic amenities, it’s tough to pursue spiritual life. Without a vital economy, spiritual life cannot flourish.
The Only Path Without Dead-Endings
Many people are now rising up in struggle to curtail the excesses of the globe spanning metacorporations. Any successes they may achieve in their struggles may lessen the oppressiveness of life in the global company town, but I fear it will not be sufficient for spiritual life to flourish.
What is needed is for humanity to embrace a new paradigm of development, a life-centered economy that returns economic power to people and communities, that promotes equity, and that manages a healthy balance with the biosphere.
Although the path to get there may be a bit rocky, it is the only path forward that doesn’t have dead-endings. And it’s the only path that aligns with our core humanity.
Small is Beautiful, Local is Our Future
In 1973, British economist E. F. Schumacher published his famous work, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered. In this book, Schumacher championed an economic system that maintains a human scale.
In the 1990s, Helena Norberg-Hodge, inspired by her anthropological study of the people and culture of Ladakh (made famous in her book, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh) began to critique economic globalization and champion economic localization as a way to revitalize cultural and biological diversity and strengthen local communities. Her 2019 book, Local is Our Future argues for a systemic shift from a globalized economy to decentralized economies.
The list is long of life-centered thinkers who have advocated for economic relocalization. Here’s some notable advocates I’m aware of (a list admittedly weighted toward Americans): Ralph Borsodi, Wendell Berry, Paul Goodman, Kirkpatrick Sale, Murry Bookchin, Vandana Shiva, Michael Shuman, David Suzuki, Martin Khor, and Jeremy Rifkin. All have made the case, each from their own perspective, that humanity’s future must not follow the logic of economic globalism.
It’s worth noting that while no thinkers on this list are on the conservative right, there are yet many MAGA supporters who have directly experienced globalization’s disruption to lives and communities, and who loathe globalization and would find common ground with the call for localization.
Min Specs of Economic Localization
How would economic decentralization function? The best guiding framework I know of is a set of five principles proposed by P.R. Sarkar.
1 —The resources of a region should be controlled and utilized by the local people.
Unless resources are of strategic global importance, local people should control their extraction and use. They should also process their raw materials into finished goods rather than export unprocessed resources.
2 —Production should be based on consumer needs, not profit.
Goods should be produced to meet people’s needs, not to maximize profits. An economy based on consumer needs will focus on producing basic commodities rather than luxury goods and on producing for local markets rather than for export so that people’s needs are better met. Also, more money will remain in the local economy, stimulating increased production, jobs, and purchasing capacity.
3 — Production and distribution should be organized primarily through cooperatives.
Cooperatives decentralize economic power. They do not seek to dominate markets, so they do not become global enterprises. By their nature, they maintain a human scale and they support communities. Cooperatives thrive in a decentralized economy, and because cooperatives serve local needs, they give local people economic stability and security.
4 — Only local people should work in and control local economic enterprises.
Local people are best qualified to guide local enterprises in a manner that promotes their own economic well-being. Outside interests shouldn’t interfere with local enterprises, as occurs when an outside corporation establishes a production plant or distribution center, bringing a management team from outside and making corporate decisions from far away. The local economy should fully develop and utilize the skills and capacities of local people.
5 — Essential commodities should be produced by local enterprises.
As much as is reasonable, basic requirements — staple foods, common building materials, basic medicines, clothing, and everyday household goods — should be produced regionally. This ensures that regions aren’t dependent on outside economies for essential goods.
Corporations Would Revile It, the Common People Would Embrace It
A call for economic decentralization would provide a rallying cry that patriots on both sides of the political spectrum could get behind.
And it would help solidify a vision for a post-capitalist economy that serves people and the planet above the profits of the metacorporations. The corporations would revile it, but the common people — left and right — would embrace it.
Were humanity to resist living in a global company town and adopt economic decentralization, diverse cultures would thrive, ecosystems would be better protected, and the human spirit would be freed from an oppressive weight.