You should never judge a book by its cover. Nor, I now know, by its title. From Global to Local: the Making of Things and the End of Globalization seemed to say it all. Here at last was a significant figure – an academic from Cambridge University, no less – talking the language of economic localization. I thumbed through the table of contents with real anticipation, even excitement. Perhaps I had found a new soulmate: someone who not only understood the perils inherent in globalization, but who had come to the conclusion that we needed to head in precisely the opposite direction.
But what a disappointment! Chapter by troubling chapter, it emerges that Finbarr Livesey’s take on localization leaves the key assumptions and frameworks that underpin neoliberal economics unchallenged, and thereby keeps the fundamentals of corporate rule firmly in place.
Front and center in Livesey’s thinking are two interrelated assumptions: that progress requires economic growth, and that economic growth requires industrial production and high technology. He is not alone in this analysis; in fact, these two assumptions encapsulate the worldview of mainstream economists, politicians and commentators. But I would argue passionately that they are simply wrong. If we allow our minds to be enclosed in a reductionist, econometric way of seeing the world, we are denying our own nature; we are denying biological realities; we are denying life itself. And we are guaranteeing ever greater social and ecological breakdown.
While I reject many, if not most, of Livesey’s conclusions, I cannot fault much of his argumentation for the end of globalization, nor his clarion call about the perils of unbridled competition. He recognizes too that Nature has its limits, and he is unequivocal about the threat posed by climate change. He provides strong arguments for the need to move away from planned obsolescence, and makes a clear case for the “circular economy”.
But there is no vision of a better world. Though he warns against techno-utopianism, the only future he presents – albeit without much enthusiasm – is a sterile, soulless one of robots and 3-D printing, of prosperity achieved by distancing ourselves ever more from the natural world. In other words, going local digitally. There is very little questioning of what digitization will mean for our jobs, for our communities, for our sense of who we are. By contrast, we are invited to marvel at the extraordinary growth of global industrial output, resulting in the 10 billion unique products now available to us as consumers.
My own starting point could hardly be more different. As I see it, creating viable economic systems cannot happen without bringing the economy down to earth – to the interdependent biosphere that is the source of every last thing we manufacture and use. Crucially, that means recognizing the central importance of food and agriculture. Food is quite literally the bread and butter of a resilient economy, and yet unsurprisingly – and in keeping with the bias of most of the policymakers and CEOs who are shaping our future – it merits barely a mention in these pages. (Food does appear once in the index, but only as “food: printed”.)
The kind of truly localized economies that are required to prevent further cultural destruction and ecocide are nowhere to be seen in this book, but they are emerging in the writings of alternative thinkers and in civil-society movements. Out of the machine-made reality that comprises modern urban existence, there is a deep longing welling up: an unstoppable force towards life – towards the plants, animals, stones, earth and water that we co-evolved with. Worldwide, in a global local food movement, people are reconnecting with the sources of their food: growing their own or getting to know nearby farmers and small producers. They are reclaiming local skills and knowledge for local needs. Ever more people are rejecting a passive consumer culture in favor of local, face-to-face participation – with music, song, dance and theater. Rather than enriching distant investors and anonymous corporations, they are enriching their own lives by rebuilding community.
Livesey is right about one thing: globalization is coming to an end. Let’s hope that we can liberate ourselves from the worldview that lay behind it and forge a more sane, humane and livable future.
I didn’t get what I want from this review: does the book address what we should manufacture locally, at what level, district, regional or national levels. perhaps only where the raw materials exist. Some places will have the cheapest solar panels others none. Lots of ‘concerned’ people around me grow food. The fact of the matter is they have no making capacity even if they had the inclination. The tradies generally oppose the values ascribed here-in. Making stuff, which stuff, how and where are not dealt with in any realistic way in these pages.
I have not yet read the book, but a couple of areas that seems to be forgotten in many of these discussions are democratizing the ownership of capital while tying it to community based planning and the innovative use of appropriate technology to lessen the carbon footprint of the community as a whole. At the same time, we should be providing for its residents and having enough left over for balanced fair trade with other communities. Markets are not a dirty word and they are not likely to go away, but they can be tamed to meet the needs of the community and the people who reside there. A steady state economy can be accomplished but democratization of wealth has to be in the picture at the community level, regional levels and even national levels.
Globalization by another name is neocolonization. Neocolonization is increasingly rapidly nearing its terminal phase as earth resources in neocolonized nations (and the entire earth for that matter) are past peak. The other facet of neocolonization is the exploitation of cheap labor. Cheap labor is fast on its way to being replaced by AI and robotics. Within probably 1-2 generations there will be neither resources to exploit nor much need left for cheap labor to exploit in the South.
The neocolonized nations will be free. Yes, already robbed and plundered quite thoroughly of their nonrenewable wealth by the neocolonial game, but at least they’ll be able to exercise more real sovereignty over their way of life.
Getting through the final stages of this process toward freedom will not be pleasant, neither for the elite classes who have been managing the extraction and exploitation processes nor for the masses whose livelihoods have become dependent on the neocolonial game, but they may at least now have a chance to make their own local futures. Those will not likely be digital futures simply because their renewable tradable resources are not likely to be sufficiently abundant to trade for high levels of digital technologies, and, under neocolonial game rules they never had the chance to develop their own local tech-industrial power to produce such things. What they will have though is their renewable resource base and their life spirit and intellect.
The breakdown of globalization will mean that the North winds up with localized high-tech economies and the South goes back to localized lower-tech economies, perhaps with a modicum of modernity that they are able to produce locally and sustainably or by trading renewable resources with the North. I think too that they will have a greater freedom/opportunity for local creativity to develop technologies and economic systems that will ultimately become even more advanced than the North, more advanced in that they will be more in harmony with the earth and yet able to provide a higher level of modernity than they had before the neocolonial process led them onto the North’s path of dystopia.
I hope that most people in the North will actually prefer the lower-tech way connected back to the earth, but the charm of modernity and the pop-culturally programmed desire for ever-increasing god-like pseudo-control over nature may mean an ultimately self-destructive outcome for them.
Growth will be changed, and is now being changed to no-growth, by the hand of God…biophysical economic reality…peak resources and dropping EROEI and in general, expanding beyond just energy resources, dropping resource return on resources invested. Digital technologies will do nothing to stop this…they still must follow the laws of physics.
Hsun Tzu: “Man forms a triad with Heaven and Earth.” Neglect any side of this triad and your economic system, way of life, is bound to fail.