After Capitalism Shift #9 The Future Is Local

During the initial research for After Capitalism, it was striking how many of the concepts had a local approach and scale as part of their recommendations. More than a dozen years later, it’s no longer surprising. Localization, the shift to local, distributed, and decentralized, is a top ten global trend. It comes up in almost every project we work on, regardless of the domain. For After Capitalism, three reasons for “the future is local” comes to the forefront:

1. A strong belief that local is the right organizing principle for governance.

I posted on Robin Hahnel’s Participatory Economy that provides us with a wonderful and useful handbook that “demonstrates concretely how to reconcile comprehensive democratic planning with worker and consumer autonomy.” I also recommend the work of Eric Meier and the folks at Indep (International Network for Democratic Economic Planning). They are building a global network with the goal of advancing an After Capitalism economic system based on democratic economic planning.

In addition to local governance, we can add in the social benefit of the preference for things local, local crafts, local brands, farmer’s markets. On top of that, keeping money in the community rather than seeing it accumulate in some distant corporate headquarters is an “easy” sell. Put these three together and we have a solid case for local being of our top ten shifts.

A cautionary note is to be careful not to see local is the solution to everything and is automatically better in every case. We see this romanticization in folk politics characteristic of the ineffective left driver. It cannot be ignored that the world is increasingly globally interconnected and there are indeed global-scale issues that need to be addressed at the global scale. It’s not as simple as every local community for itself. There does need to be global coordination.

2. The global supply chain no longer makes sense.

The logic of capitalism is to increase efficiency and profits. As it spread globally, it brought global supply chains with it. It was very much an exploitative journey, finding new territories to “civilize”, but also to exploit. The benefits were always flowing chiefly to the capitalists. Once a particular territory or country had been sufficiently “civilized” that is, its costs of labor went up, it was on to the next place to civilize and find cheap labor. As we’ve seen, capitalism is running out of places to provide cheap labor, as that cheap labor needs to be in a context that capitalism can take advantage of.

So, one begins to see the end of globalization as a source of new value to find and exploit. And thus, the value of the accompanying global supply chains begins to make less sense. It was, and still is in many cases, cheaper to make things in China and ship from there. As China continues to develop economically, that labor will not be so cheap and goods coming from their will eventually no longer make economic sense. Africa is looked at as next, but if I were Africa, I might not be so eager to make this bargain.

3. Environmental management is better done by those with local knowledge and a direct stake,

Because the system has not accounted for “external” environmental costs, shipping things around globally looked more efficient than it really was. With the advent of automation and new manufacturing technology of additive manufacturing, the case for making things locally makes more economic sense along with the obvious environmental benefits.

This one is tricky in that there is a strong caveat that there must be global coordination among these networked activities. A big challenge, or trap to avoid, is getting parochial about local interests at the expense of the larger commons.

Three reason why it is fair to say that the future is local. – Andy Hines