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A lot of stuff going on in deep thought this week, but a theme emerging from all this seems to be relocalizing and deglobalizing. Does that mean we are all going to be become “peasants of the future”, and if so, what does that mean? -KS
The Zero Growth Mind
Ugo Bardi, The Oil Drum: Europe
We often think that we have a problem of scarcity of resources. It is not so: scarcity is not absolute. Whether we have enough of something or not depends on our perception of what we need. And, because we seem to think that we never have enough, we tend to use what we have faster than it can be replaced. It is the phenomenon called “overexploitation” or “overshoot”. It is the main problem that we are facing and it is all because of the way the human mind works. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, overexploitation is all in the brain of the exploiter.
Nate Hagens has argued several times in “The Oil Drum” that the human mind is geared for growth (see, for instance here ). Apparently, we act on the basis of a series of neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine) that make us search for continuously renewed stimulation. This way of functioning of the human mind is what generates our tendency of “discounting the future”, that is of giving a lower value to the future than to the present. This rapidly declining discount function is the key of the mechanism of overexploitation.
This view of human behavior is based on experimental evidence which, however, is mostly limited to humans living in the modern, fast growing countries of the Western world. But present day humans may be just a short lived phenomenon. Growth cannot continue forever and sooner or later we’ll have to settle in a condition of zero growth; very likely after a phase of decline. Zero growth has been the normal condition of human life for the past few millennia of agricultural civilizations. Surely the world changed even in ancient times, but the perception of this change was denied to people constrained to their fields, their family, their village, and little more. It was the world of peasants…
People living in a future zero growth world will not necessarily live and think as ancient peasants, but surely there is a lot of food for thought here.
From Peter Farb’s “Humankind”, Triad Press, 1978. Excerpts from Chapter 7 “The Perennial Peasants”
Although peasants are widely scattered throughout the world, owe allegiance to many nations, speak a variety of languages, and display dissimilar customs, they nevertheless share certain fundamental traits. For this reason they often give the impression of being – as Karl Marx once declared with some exaggeration – as alike as the potatoes in a sack. <..>
Almost anywhere that peasants are encountered, they are likely to give the same impression of being conservative, individualistic, prone to suspicion, jealous, violent, superstitious and unthrifty. <..> To the peasant, the farm is a household rather than a business enterprise designed to turn a profit, as are most farms in North America and Western Europe today. The household farm barely provides subsistence for the family after the obligations due to the owners of the land and the wielders of political power are met. Peasants are unlike modern farmers also in that they do not rely on machinery, modern techniques of plant science, or hired labor. The extreme inefficiency of their methods can only be compensated for only by long hours of backbreaking labor. <..> Such has been the lot of peasants in almost all societies, since complex civilizations arose about 6000 years ago…
(14 Sept 2009)
The Peasantry of the Future
John Medaille, Front Porch Republic
In answer to the question, “What do the poor want?” Simone Weil replied “They want you to look at them.” I take Simone’s answer to mean we must look at this poor person or that poor village, and see them in their actual situation. There are any number of people, of various political persuasions, willing to look at “the poor” and at “poverty.” They rarely look at actual poor people, which is just as well since they would not like what they see; what they would see are people with a very different set of values, values that are incompatible with the modern world. This is especially true of the poor peasant. Capitalist and communist alike are willing to do all in their power to ensure that the peasant shall not be poor, but only on the condition that he shall not be a peasant. They both promise to give him valuable things if only he will surrender his values.
This is certainly true of the Quechua-speaking people of the Peruvian highlands, descendants of the Inca empire but for centuries poor peasants living on the margins of the dominant Spanish culture. Having little to steal, Lima had little interest in them. And so they continued in their peasant ways on marginal lands in the mountains…
Adam Webb has looked at the question of values. His first book, Beyond the Global Culture Wars was a masterful look at the clash of values that underlies our current conflicts with other cultures. In his new book, A Path of Our Own; An Andean Village and Tomorrow’s Economy of Values, Webb, a Harvard-trained sociologist, takes the trouble to actually look at an actual village (Pomatambo in the Peruvian highlands) and actually bothered to get to know the people and find out what they want…
In formulating his solutions, Adam Webb draws on Western agrarians and distributists like Wendall Barry, Chesterton, Belloc, Schumacher, and the MondragĂłn experience, as well as Eastern distributists like Liang Shuming and Mohandas Ghandi. But Webb does fault these thinkers as being too devoted to place and particularity to the detriment of the universally held values that each of these particular places expresses…
(6 Jul, 2009)
The Virtues of Deglobalization: Has the time finally come to reverse and end globalization?
Walden Bello, Business Mirror
THE current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years as the much-heralded process of financial and trade interdependence went into reverse and became the transmission belt not of prosperity but of economic crisis and collapse.
End of an era…
Intellectual discourse, however, has not yet shown many signs of a break with orthodoxy. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on free trade, the primacy of private enterprise and a minimalist role for the state, continues to be the default language among policymakers. The establishment critics of market fundamentalism, including luminaries such as Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, have become entangled in endless debates over how large the stimulus programs should be and whether the state should retain its interventionist presence in the auto industry and finance or, once stabilized, return the companies and banks to the private sector. Moreover, some, such as Stiglitz, continue to believe in what they perceive to be the economic benefits of globalization while bemoaning its social costs…
11 pillars of the alternative
There are 11 key prongs of the deglobalization paradigm.
1. Production for the domestic market must again become the center of gravity of the economy rather than production for export markets.
2. The principle of subsidiarity should be enshrined in economic life by encouraging production of goods at the level of the community and at the national level, if this can be done at reasonable cost, in order to preserve community.
3. Trade policy—that is, quotas and tariffs—should be used to protect the local economy from destruction by corporate-subsidized commodities with artificially low prices.
4. Industrial policy—including subsidies, tariffs and trade—should be used to revitalize and strengthen the manufacturing sector.
5. Long-postponed measures of equitable income redistribution and land redistribution (including urban land reform) can create a vibrant internal market that would serve as the anchor of the economy and produce local financial resources for investment…
Foreign Policy in Focus columnist Walden Bello represents the party-list Akbayan in the Philippines’ House of Representatives, heads the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and serves as senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. The author of Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy and 14 other books, he can be contacted at waldenbello@yahoo.
(10 September 2009)
