Saturday, January 03, 2009
The Family Wisdom of Localism, Part II
One of my earliest memories is of seeing Star Wars IV in the theatres. I distinctly remember being awed by Luke's family dinner, where they sat around the table drinking blue juice. (This was in 1978, before I knew about Raspberry Kool-Aid.) If the future could hold such novelties as unnaturally-coloured juice, I thought, it was a grand thing indeed.
Localism abhors most technology, lumping it in with size as an evil of industrialism. It's true that when industrialism and technology are used for profit, human health and the environment become externalities - things no one pays for - and the planet suffers.
But localism doesn't understand how capitalism is a system of social relations, open to change. So its response to the 'scale-up' of modern capitalism is not revolution, but a scale-back. The answer is technology 'appropriate' to small, rural communities: "back to the land is an option with a permanent, quiet appeal", says Kingsolver, speaking in glowing terms of the Amish. There are two major problems with de-scaling.
More city folks making fun of the quiet charm of rural life - The Mighty Boosh
Size has already happened
Firstly, they completely miss the historical conquest of agriculture by capitalism. As Marx pointed out, capitalist social relations destroy the unity of agriculture and handicrafts, constantly penetrating “into enclaves of simple commodity production and production in pure use-values which had survived from pre-capitalist society.” (Mandel, 378) Marx predicted industrial technology would be applied to agriculture early on. This is due to downward pressure on profit rates.
As industry mechanizes, the proportion of machines to humans used in production rises (known as the organic composition of capital.) Machines are cheaper than humans. But this cuts into profits, a) because buying machinery forces capitalists to purchase even more machinery and b) fewer workers receive a wage and can't buy what's produced. Capitalists look for new opportunities to temporarily raise profits, applying technology to agriculture and raising productivity (before cutting back employment and wages, and the cycle begins again.)
"I will first lower, then raise your production costs!"
Ernest Mandel argues that prior to World War 2, “ground-rent [money paid to landlords] ladelled off a substantial part of the capital needed for such mechanization.” But government-supported industry developed machinery and chemicals for agriculture. Thus “the age of late capitalism… has been characterized by an even greater increase of labour productivity in agriculture than in industry.”
The idea that agriculture can be de-capitalized on a mass scale poses real, concrete problems the localists never address. Who would take away the machines? How would people be fed without a mass exodus back to the land? Decapitalization does happen 'naturally': through capital's inherent tendency to destroy itself through war and economic crisis, as David Harvey argues. It's fascinating that Kingsolver indulges in the schadenfreude that I pointed out last week: giving up machines is historically done through laying people off or bombing them. It's nothing to look forward to (unless you're a secret Malthusian and think people are the problem, which I'd argue is at the root of modern environmentalism - more on that later.)
Capitalist crisis gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling
People like cool stuff
This leaves persuasion as the only other way to get back to the land (presumably forced de-urbanization - Pol Pot's Cambodia - isn't an option.) So how will the localists convince billions of people to give up their urban privileges? Through the force of their argument? Which brings me to my second problem with scaling back: the localists display a spectacular lack of imagination. The forces of production developed under capitalism could unleash massive positive development, if only they were organized rationally - a fact Marx never forgot, even in the midst of his harshest denunciations. As he writes in the Manifesto, on petty-bourgeois socialism,
Capitalism also makes things people enjoy
For every Hummer burning through the ecosphere, there's a mass transit system. For every coal-fired plant, there's a solar panel. As I've argued before, technology developed for capital will not help people. But human creative potential is something capitalism colonizes, not invents. We have the potential to create a technological utopia.
In defence of high-tech
I use the word 'utopia' deliberately, to take it back from the hippies. I'd like to go on record that I hate gardening. I have bad childhood memories of fruit-picking under the hot sun, my back aching and flies buzzing around me. I have nothing but respect for the migrant workers forced to make their living this way. I think it's inhuman, and I look forward to the day when it will stop, either because agriculture is completely mechanized, or because all our food comes from a matter replicator. Laboratories can already synthesize complex flavours without the need for actual foodstuffs. Why not synthesize textures and nutrients as well? And free us up for more important things, like Wii bowling?
If anyone has a spare Wii, I accept donations
OK, OK, you don't have to come with me to my brave new world. There will still be fresh food after the revolution, hopefully a lot more of it. But freeing the human body from natural constraints is a dream stretching back thousands of years. For localism, the answer to size and technology is community. Yet many things create community. Gardening is one; video games are another, and which hobby produces line-ups at midnight sales? People yearn to experience different virtual worlds. The technotopia impulse doesn't have to be the exclusive domain of the Right, carving out small (local!) havens of high-tech while the mass of humanity suffers.
Left-wing culture has always embodied the dream of unleashed human creative potential. Marx alludes to it in the Manifesto, where rational, democratic planning ushers in communism, the beginning of true human history. The space fantasy of 1970s African-American funk music, and some of today's speculative fiction, are further examples of the wedding of hope for a human utopia with new tools to achieve it. Like human liberation in general, Marxism has taken this dream and grounded its utopian impulses in materialism: the real movement of humanity to free itself from capitalism. I'd suggest the continuing popularity of sci-fi shows there's a huge cross-section of people who still maintain a utopic impulse, however alienated and distorted, which localism completely ignores.
Freed of the need to sell our labour power, the future could be one big game
Who are the localists?
Unless you feel guilty about shopping
There is a gaping hole in localist theory where collective action against capital should be. I have yet to read anything about the union movement - much less the socialist movement - in localist literature (except as a source of investment funds!) The impact of this is no less pathetic for being so obvious. As Ernest Mandel writes:
If only the workers were more motivated, they'd make something of themselves
Why couldn't the world work this way? Why couldn't everyone shop locally, spend more on good food, live ethically? Franz Jakubowski writes of the middle classes,
The one thing that has restricted capital is mass resistance: fighting, not ignoring or circumventing, the power of big business. Threatening to destroy it works much better than trying to out-shop it, drop out or just wringing your hands. Strikes, demonstrations, occupations and riots are local actions I can support. Localists identify the alienation and degradation that capitalism creates. But to stop capitalism, we must organize a revolutionary movement that wrests capital, local and international, from rulers' to workers' control.
Localism abhors most technology, lumping it in with size as an evil of industrialism. It's true that when industrialism and technology are used for profit, human health and the environment become externalities - things no one pays for - and the planet suffers.
But localism doesn't understand how capitalism is a system of social relations, open to change. So its response to the 'scale-up' of modern capitalism is not revolution, but a scale-back. The answer is technology 'appropriate' to small, rural communities: "back to the land is an option with a permanent, quiet appeal", says Kingsolver, speaking in glowing terms of the Amish. There are two major problems with de-scaling.
More city folks making fun of the quiet charm of rural life - The Mighty Boosh
Size has already happened
Firstly, they completely miss the historical conquest of agriculture by capitalism. As Marx pointed out, capitalist social relations destroy the unity of agriculture and handicrafts, constantly penetrating “into enclaves of simple commodity production and production in pure use-values which had survived from pre-capitalist society.” (Mandel, 378) Marx predicted industrial technology would be applied to agriculture early on. This is due to downward pressure on profit rates.
As industry mechanizes, the proportion of machines to humans used in production rises (known as the organic composition of capital.) Machines are cheaper than humans. But this cuts into profits, a) because buying machinery forces capitalists to purchase even more machinery and b) fewer workers receive a wage and can't buy what's produced. Capitalists look for new opportunities to temporarily raise profits, applying technology to agriculture and raising productivity (before cutting back employment and wages, and the cycle begins again.)
"I will first lower, then raise your production costs!"
Ernest Mandel argues that prior to World War 2, “ground-rent [money paid to landlords] ladelled off a substantial part of the capital needed for such mechanization.” But government-supported industry developed machinery and chemicals for agriculture. Thus “the age of late capitalism… has been characterized by an even greater increase of labour productivity in agriculture than in industry.”
The idea that agriculture can be de-capitalized on a mass scale poses real, concrete problems the localists never address. Who would take away the machines? How would people be fed without a mass exodus back to the land? Decapitalization does happen 'naturally': through capital's inherent tendency to destroy itself through war and economic crisis, as David Harvey argues. It's fascinating that Kingsolver indulges in the schadenfreude that I pointed out last week: giving up machines is historically done through laying people off or bombing them. It's nothing to look forward to (unless you're a secret Malthusian and think people are the problem, which I'd argue is at the root of modern environmentalism - more on that later.)
Capitalist crisis gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling
People like cool stuff
This leaves persuasion as the only other way to get back to the land (presumably forced de-urbanization - Pol Pot's Cambodia - isn't an option.) So how will the localists convince billions of people to give up their urban privileges? Through the force of their argument? Which brings me to my second problem with scaling back: the localists display a spectacular lack of imagination. The forces of production developed under capitalism could unleash massive positive development, if only they were organized rationally - a fact Marx never forgot, even in the midst of his harshest denunciations. As he writes in the Manifesto, on petty-bourgeois socialism,
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.
Capitalism also makes things people enjoy
For every Hummer burning through the ecosphere, there's a mass transit system. For every coal-fired plant, there's a solar panel. As I've argued before, technology developed for capital will not help people. But human creative potential is something capitalism colonizes, not invents. We have the potential to create a technological utopia.
In defence of high-tech
I use the word 'utopia' deliberately, to take it back from the hippies. I'd like to go on record that I hate gardening. I have bad childhood memories of fruit-picking under the hot sun, my back aching and flies buzzing around me. I have nothing but respect for the migrant workers forced to make their living this way. I think it's inhuman, and I look forward to the day when it will stop, either because agriculture is completely mechanized, or because all our food comes from a matter replicator. Laboratories can already synthesize complex flavours without the need for actual foodstuffs. Why not synthesize textures and nutrients as well? And free us up for more important things, like Wii bowling?
If anyone has a spare Wii, I accept donations
OK, OK, you don't have to come with me to my brave new world. There will still be fresh food after the revolution, hopefully a lot more of it. But freeing the human body from natural constraints is a dream stretching back thousands of years. For localism, the answer to size and technology is community. Yet many things create community. Gardening is one; video games are another, and which hobby produces line-ups at midnight sales? People yearn to experience different virtual worlds. The technotopia impulse doesn't have to be the exclusive domain of the Right, carving out small (local!) havens of high-tech while the mass of humanity suffers.
Left-wing culture has always embodied the dream of unleashed human creative potential. Marx alludes to it in the Manifesto, where rational, democratic planning ushers in communism, the beginning of true human history. The space fantasy of 1970s African-American funk music, and some of today's speculative fiction, are further examples of the wedding of hope for a human utopia with new tools to achieve it. Like human liberation in general, Marxism has taken this dream and grounded its utopian impulses in materialism: the real movement of humanity to free itself from capitalism. I'd suggest the continuing popularity of sci-fi shows there's a huge cross-section of people who still maintain a utopic impulse, however alienated and distorted, which localism completely ignores.
Freed of the need to sell our labour power, the future could be one big game
Who are the localists?
"that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat." (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier)Assuming gardening is the best choice for community, rather than one time-consuming, back-breaking choice among many, is not about reconnecting with our animal spirits. I'd argue it's a piece of middle class habitus: for those professionals suitably distanced from subsistence living, they can get their hands dirty with no fear of having to make it subsistence living. Not coincidentally, they've never considered what stopping the big, non-local corporations might involve, beyond well-meaning entrepreneurship.
Unless you feel guilty about shopping
There is a gaping hole in localist theory where collective action against capital should be. I have yet to read anything about the union movement - much less the socialist movement - in localist literature (except as a source of investment funds!) The impact of this is no less pathetic for being so obvious. As Ernest Mandel writes:
When thinkers sincerely and profoundly hostile to capitalism proclaim the impotence of the proletariat [or, for our purposes, never even consider its agency] in the imperialist countries to challenge the existing social order, their own tragic misjudgement makes them unwitting cogs in the vast ideological machine constructed by the ruling class to achieve the vital objective of convincing the working class that it is helpless to change society. (Late Capitalism, 506)The reason for localist despair is complex. I know the localists aren't the enemy. They're just well-meaning liberals confronted with a problem so vast in scope they can't see a way out. They're responding according to the habitus of their class position: thrift, hard work and charity. If you're well-off, your labour counts for something. That professorship is hard work, but people listen to you on the radio. The small business you run (not a convenience store of course - maybe a yoga studio) puts you in touch with other enabled liberals, gives you a membership in a small business association and opens a politician's door. Through your own hard work, you matter.
If only the workers were more motivated, they'd make something of themselves
Why couldn't the world work this way? Why couldn't everyone shop locally, spend more on good food, live ethically? Franz Jakubowski writes of the middle classes,
their role in economic life is restricted to the sphere of circulation (small businessmen, etc.); or else they are not direct participants in the economic process (liberal professions). They only come into contact with the basic phenomenon of capitalism, the commodity, when it is in circulation; or... [when they produce] goods for their own individual needs.... Of course, the middle classes are in a position to see the symptoms of capitalism, but they cannot see the cause of those symptoms. Consequently, the economic and social changes which they strive for relate to the symptoms alone, and the changes, if achieved, remain within the framework of capitalism.I'm not interested in the remaining within the framework of capitalism. I look forward to the power of technology put into the collective hands of the working class. The dynamics Marx identified - centralization and concentration of capital - have increased dramatically in the past 150 years, and all the ethical alternative schemes to capitalism haven't impeded its growth an iota.
The one thing that has restricted capital is mass resistance: fighting, not ignoring or circumventing, the power of big business. Threatening to destroy it works much better than trying to out-shop it, drop out or just wringing your hands. Strikes, demonstrations, occupations and riots are local actions I can support. Localists identify the alienation and degradation that capitalism creates. But to stop capitalism, we must organize a revolutionary movement that wrests capital, local and international, from rulers' to workers' control.
Labels: class position, localism, petty-bourgeois, technology
