Moving Towards A Just Local Economy

The following reflection was written by a member of the Servants Y-team in India.  If you’re interested in joining this team, you can learn more here.

In a recent conversation with my father, we agreed that the best route for both people and God’s creation (specifically the land) would be a move towards a local economy. In that conversation my dad lamented that we couldn’t work towards such an economy on an individual basis. I disagreed.

I started understanding the benefits of a local economy 8-10 years ago. I saw that multinational corporations often moved their labor operations to the place where they could most profitably abuse the workers, and that consumers on the other side of the world didn’t know what happened to the workers that were abused, and often didn’t care. Accountability is more possible for goods that had been produced locally, where you knew how it had been made and who had made it. Not only would you have greater knowledge of the conditions, but most people have greater empathy for workers they know in their own community.

There are other things to like about locally-sourcing goods. Obviously they reduce transportation costs and wasteful shipping and packaging. But concern for the land probably tops the positive justifications. We are at a point in history where we are progressively destroying more and more land. That can’t continue. The greatest cause behind long-term destruction of land is absentee owners who own so much land, and live so far from the land they are destroying (and the people affected by that destruction) that they no longer care what happens to it. Many people are starting to notice this issue, but the philosopher/theologian Wendell Berry has been one of the most consistent voices laying out the reasons why our move towards global economy is destroying the people and the land (What Are People For?. Citizenship Papers, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community).

I believe that this more just local economy can only be brought about by individuals. Here’s how it seems to me:

1. We know that the current situation is unsustainable to the land, to wildlife, to working people, and probably to consumers. Our farming, our industry, our energy production, and our transportation networks are abusing people and nature. So something needs to change.
2. In the current system, the only ways things can change is if the producers choose to change, if the consumers choose to change, or if the government forces change.[1. I don’t include “if the workers choose to change” because workers have virtually no power in the modern economy. In the global economy, any effort towards change by workers in one place is countered by corporations via violence, manipulation of government, or simply by moving operations to a place where the workers don’t have power.]  Unfortunately, the current producers are very large, and are so distanced from actual operations that they are primarily money-managers, unlikely to change for any reason other than loss of profit. Short-term profit is unlikely to line up with anything good, so we can’t expect that producers will change in a manner that is beneficial to society in general.

   Consumers are the ones most likely to act in the interest of society, because they represent the broadest piece of it. But in the current economy consumers are so distanced from the means of production that they have no way of knowing how to act or who to buy from. It is extremely difficult for the average person to collect any information on who or what is abused in a product’s production – in fact, in many cases even the upper-level management may not know! In the absence of clear information, they act on their individual interests, which usually means buying the cheapest thing, which is often the product of the most abuse. 

   Government is supposed to act in the interests of society, but by far the greatest influence on government is the wealthy, thus government almost never acts against the interests of the wealthy. So we have to hope that the wealthy realize that their long-term interests align with the rest of society, which is unlikely. Also, when government does act by forcing measures with which the population doesn’t agree, the people who don’t want to obey usually find a way to circumvent the government’s intervention.[2. See: British attempts to protect Native Americans from the colonists (resulting in Revolution and then the decimation of Native Americans), the North’s attempts to free slaves in the South (resulting in rise of Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and a century of segregation and oppression), the federal government’s attempt to prohibit alcohol (resulting in huge rise in bootlegging and organized crime), and the judiciary’s attempt to desegregate the school system (resulting in White Flight, urban decay, and de facto segregation).] 

3. Therefore, the producers are too large and money-focused to change, the consumers are too distanced from the operation (and cost-focused) to change, and the government is too wealth-dependent to change (and usually fails to change societal norms via force anyway). We are stuck in a rut with no impetus for structural change. 
4. In my mind, that rut will only be broken if the producers are smaller and can focus on more than just money, the consumers are closer to the operation and focused on more than mere cost, or the government is less wealth-dependent. All those solutions are answered by a transition towards a local economy. 

   If we buy locally, we support smaller producers who live in the place they produce, who know their land and their workers and their customers, and who thus are likely to care about more than just the profit line. We also are more likely to become producers ourselves, as we are part of a reciprocal community economy rather than getting all our needs met in gigantic stores. 

   If we buy locally, we customers are able to know the land our stuff is made on, the people who made it, and the manner in which it was made. We are more likely to be empathetic to the sustainability of land and the just treatment of the workers. We are more willing to pay more for higher quality products, because we have witnessed the higher-quality production first-hand. 

   If we have local economies, we reduce the pool of super-wealthy people who exert undue influence on the government. Rather than a limited number of national interests, there would be a great diversity of local interests. Government power would have to come from a wider base, and would likely have to focus on enabling choice and encouraging diversity and options, rather than mandating a single majority-based route.[3. This might be one of the major reasons that the federal government was so much smaller and so much more based around freedom in the early years of the United States. In that more agriculture-based era, local bodies made local decisions, and there were few institutions that held a national power base.] 

5. So how could such a local system start? It won’t start in the wealthy producers, because they have too much invested in the status quo. It is unlikely to start with government – it would decrease their power and it is not in the interest of the wealthy producers who fund them. So I think it can only start among the small producers, and among the consumers (both by consuming locally and by becoming small producers). These are decisions we chose to make individually, and attempt to influence others to make on a person-by-person level. I don’t see any other option for moving towards sustainability other than hitting catastrophic disaster first.

Are there holes in that line of reasoning? Can you see other ways to move towards just local economies beyond our own personal decisions to do so and encouragement to others to do the same?

For some of the old Biblical push towards these same ideas, see Isaiah 3:14-15, 5:8-9, 58:3-4, Jeremiah 22:13, Amos 2:6-7, 4:1-2, Micah 2:1-2, 7:3, Malachi 3:5, Matthew 6:19-21, Luke 12:15-21, and Acts 4:32-35.