The Political Economy of Localism Greg Sharzer A

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LOCALISM

GREG SHARZER

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

YORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, ONTARIO

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Localism is an ideology that suggests social change happens most effectively at the micro level, through schemes designed to re-organize the economy to meet social need. Localism criticizes the scale of industrial production, alienation and community and environmental degradation. Localism's roots in nineteenth century classical economics lead it to make unwarranted assumptions about the prospects for small business and the benefits of local production and small-scale technologies. Pro-market localists try to reform capitalism through creating ethical businesses, while anti-market localists try to transcend capitalism through cooperative production and exchange.

However, neither address how the inner dynamics of capitalist economic laws mean capital centralizes in a contradictory, crisis-prone process, in its quest to achieve lowest- cost production. These dynamics limit the viability of localist development schemes.

Localism promotes urban agriculture as an alternative to industrial agribusiness.

However, the tendency of agricultural capital to centralize, and the need for landowners to appropriate rent in the capitalist mode of production, provides a theoretical framework for understanding how social and spatial relations structure urban land uses. These processes impose severe limits on the long-term viability of local agriculture.

Localist ideology complements the petty bourgeoisie's position in the social division of labour. Localism is a form of neocommunitarianism, using the social economy to transfer costs of reproduction from capital onto labour. However, when local spaces are connected to a critique of capitalist political economy, they are vital for social movement strategy.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Prof. David McNally for his invaluable guidance, patience and support at all stages of the dissertation-writing process.

I would like to thank my supervisory committee members, Prof. Greg Albo and Prof.

Steven Tufts, for their assistance and feedback. Alan Sears' insights helped me focus and clarify my thoughts in the planning stages. Cathy Boyd-Withers at the Counselling and

Disabilities Services centre provided guidance with chapter outlines. Marlene

Quisenberry and the staff of the Political Science Department have been helpful and patient throughout.

I would like to thank Lesley Lustig for the support, insight and clarity she provided me with over the course of this degree.

My friends deserve a huge amount of praise for their kindness that assuaged the frustrations such a big project creates. To my friends Punita and Veronique, who supplied me with commiseration, pints and a regular place to visit; to Yen and Peter, whose friendship, meals and movies have provided welcome respite; to my friends and comrades Andrew, Chris, Clarice, David, Keith and Sabine, whose friendship and political insight has helped me immensely; for Alexi, Anya and Rashmee for being such welcoming, quality people and showing me that there is life beyond grad school; to people I have doubtlessly forgot - thank you.

My successes are due to these individuals' help; all errors and obfuscations are, of course, my responsibility. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT iv LIST OF FIGURES ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: LOCALISM AND CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 10 What is the local? 10 What is localism? 12 Localism's solutions 14 The development of classical political economy 16 The nature of labour and labour-power 18 Marx's critique of equal exchange 21 Proudhon's distributional reforms 22 A brief history of capitalism 29 Consumption as a moment of the capital circuit 34 Underconsumption 40 Conclusion 43 CHAPTER TWO: THE APPLICATION OF PRO- AND ANTI-MARKET LOCALISM 46 Localism and value 47 Pro-market localism 50 The idealization of small business 52 The viability of small-scale production 55 How money flows through local spaces 59 Doing away with the middleman 67 Technical limitations of consumer choice 68 Anti-market localism 75 Local Autonomy and an end to inter-local trade 76 Problems of advanced technology 80 Potential of advanced technology 83 Work as freedom 86 LETS, alternative currency schemes and credit 88 Regressive localisms 95 Conclusion 100 CHAPTER THREE: LOCALISM AND URBAN AGRICULTURE 103 The localist critique of large-scale agriculture 105 Social barriers to agriculture 110 Technical barriers to agriculture 113 Urban agriculture in the Global South 121 Cuba's urban farms 123 Belo Horizonte and local food distribution 126 What is rent? 128

vi Classical political economy and rent 129 Absolute rent 131 Monopoly rent 132 Differential rent 132 Marxian DRII 133 The contemporary relevance of rent 135 Pro-market urban agriculture 140 The Markham Foodbelt 142 Anti-market urban agriculture 146 Rent and anti-market urban agriculture 153 Consumer activism 157 Rent as resistance? 161 Conclusion 166 CHAPTER FOUR: THE IDEOLOGY OF LOCALISM 169 How commodity fetishism constructs ideology 175 The historical trajectory of the petty bourgeoisie 179 How to classify the petty bourgeois 181 Petty bourgeois ideology 189 Habitus 194 Morality 198 Voluntary simplicity 201 Voluntarism 203 Community 205 Lifestyle 209 Utopianism 213 Catastrophism 218 Malthusianism 225 Localist moralism: the locavore 229 Petty Bourgeois hegemony 236 CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICS OF LOCALISM 241 The limits of distributional reform 242 The rise of neoliberalism 244 Neoliberal urbanism and local spaces 246 Postcapitalist localism 251 Solidarity Economics 256 Solidarity Economics and labour 259 The political trajectory of localism 265 Holloway's critique and capitalist laws of motion 268 Anti-Power 271 Capitalism as contradictory 274 Combined and uneven development 277 How a future socialist society could work 278 Against postcapitalist prefiguration 281

vii For collective prefiguration 287 Learning from the history of Marxism 292 Rosa Luxemburg and social revolution 294 Participatory Budgeting in Toronto 299 Building counter-power in Ontario: the Days of Action and the global justice movement 307 Conclusion 312 CONCLUSION: FURTHER QUESTIONS 317 WORKS CITED 318

viii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 38

Figure 2 119

Figure 3 119

Figure 4 119

Figure 5 120

Figure 6 120

Figure 7 120

ix INTRODUCTION

"Localism, localism, localism." These are the first three words on the "About Us" webpage of the UK government's Department of Community and Local Government, which claims, "A radical localist vision is turning Whitehall on its head by decentralizing central government and giving power to the people" (Crown). At the same time, anarchist localism claims the theory can reinvent collective life by transcending capitalism

(Carrlson 252). When two politically opposed viewpoints claim the same term as their own, there is an urgent need for clarification.

Localism is an ideology that suggests social change happens most effectively at the micro level, through schemes designed to re-organize the economy to meet social need. It has been popularized recently through the local food movement, which criticizes the factory food system, the entrenched political power of agribusiness and the resulting negative impact on human health, the community and the natural environment. A sample of three authors provides a way to examine localist claims.

Nestle suggests that unhealthy food choices come from agribusiness's drive to profit, which shapes the food choices of consumers by marketing unhealthy food to consumers and resisting government regulation (360). While calling for strict controls on food advertising and promoting healthy lifestyles (368), Nestle's book ends by asking readers to eat ethical, local and organic ingredients. These choices will cost more and

"[t]hat is why voting with our forks must extend beyond the food choices of individuals to larger political arenas." Political advocacy will grow out of food issue groups (374).

Pollan claims that the existence of farmers' markets, organic foods and local

1 agriculture makes "strategies for escaping the Western diet" reasonable. Consumers have the power to change the "postindustrial" food system: "the more eaters who vote with their forks for a different kind of food, the more commonplace and accessible such food will become" (14). People are empowered as consumers to change an industry. The final section of his book, entitled "What to eat", addresses every aspect of individual consumption, including Consumer Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes and farmers' markets, and ends with a call for consumers to plant their own gardens (158,197).

Elton counterposes the corporatization of food production and distribution systems with local alternatives like small greenhouses and urban farms (74). Creating local systems for production and exchange will overcome environmental degradation.

She cites a United Nations panel that "identified small-scale, sustainable agriculture that combines technical know-how with traditional knowledge as the preferable model for agriculture and food production on this planet" (210).

These and other criticisms show that localism raises important questions about the quality of food, the sustainability of large-scale agriculture and the merits of large-scale production in general. However, as an ideology, localism cannot see the inherent drive of capitalism to expand and centralize and instead opposes those drives with the ethical commitment of its adherents. This succumbs to the liberal premises of classical and neoclassical economics: capitalism is imagined as a system of the direct exchange of use- values, and the market as a neutral tool to distribute them.

This dissertation is primarily a theoretical critique, although it incorporates many secondary sources. The mechanics of individual localist projects are well-documented;

2 what they lack is the theoretical context that explains both their goals and limitations.

Therefore this work advances a critique of localism based in Marx's critique of political economy. Chapter One begins by outlining the contours of localist thought, which identifies the problems of large-scale production: the quantity of goods destroys the quality of life, resulting in alienation, environmental destruction and the growth of corporate ownership. Solutions to these problems are framed around decentralization, resulting in the promotion of bioregionalism, mutualism, local economies and postcapitalist social organization.

These critiques are contextualized within the debate between Marx and classical political economy. Adam Smith's labour theory of value and David Ricardo's embodied theory of labour naturalized capitalist social relations. In contrast, Marx historicized labour power as a commodity, appropriated by the capitalist class through social control of the means of production and sold on the market. This allowed him to differentiate between concrete useful acts of labour, and socially necessary abstract labour time

(SNALT). This determines the selling price for labour power, through a complex of political, historical and cultural mediations. These are expressed through spatial boundaries at local, regional and national levels, and therefore SNALT can be seen as a tendency towards equalization, rather than the achievement of that equalization.

Those reformers who ignore this distinction soon met the limits of producing according to SNALT. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French anarcho-socialist, is typical, in that he saw capitalism as the exchange of direct, concrete labours and advocated distributional reforms to make trade fair. Ignoring capital's power to exploit labour

3 power, he envisioned capitalism being transformed slowly from within, through the creation of new, ethical forms of consumption. However, consumption is a single moment of the capital circuit. The drive to achieve SNALT means capital must strive to lower the amount of value that commodities contain. As we shall see, this centralizes capital ownership and causes periodic crises of accumulation. The ability to understand those complex processes makes Marx's critique of political economy relevant to a critique of localism in general.

Chapter Two examines specific localist schemes for change. Localism tries to overcome the effects of capitalist growth in two different ways. First, pro-market localists suggest market regulation can create ethical local capitalism. By virtue of their small size, firms will treat workers and the environment better. Local business is said to keep money in the community, and capitalist economies can change through ethical consumption.

Second, anti-market localism suggests that committed individuals can transcend capitalism through the use of simple technologies and free labour. The principles outlined in Chapter One get applied here: exchanges of concrete labours, alternative currency and credit schemes are proposed as ways to create direct, ethical trade that benefits local communities. Both pro- and anti-market localism ignore the need for capital to centralize production, distribution and credit, in the context of a world market for commodities sold at SNALT. By promoting unworkable schemes for social reform, localism becomes co- opted by the market relations it criticizes.

Chapter Three examines a concrete application of localist economics: Urban

Agriculture (UA), which is becoming increasingly popular as a way to overcome

4 malnutrition and promote local, ethical production. The limits of UA can only be understood through two phenomena integral to the capitalist mode of production: capital centralization and rent. Centralization has to do with how and why capitalist agriculture industrializes, while rent provides a theoretical framework for understanding how social and spatial relations structure urban land uses. Pro-market urban farming can occupy niches of the marketplace. However, it can neither replace large-scale agriculture nor provide the use-values its proponents claim for it. Its expansion is bounded by rising land values expressed through rent, as Detroit's Hantz farm, Markham's food belt, Los

Angeles' South Central Urban Farm and initiatives in other cities demonstrate. Anti- market initiatives, creating small agricultural plots to provide use-values to poor people, are even more limited by capital's need to generate rent in urban spaces. UA's limitations suggest changes in the food system must be linked to challenges to the political economy of capitalism itself.

Chapter Four addresses the ideology of localism. It argues that widely-held ideas arise from the mediation between the structuring material relations of different classes and their experience of those relations. Due to commodity fetishism, the operation of the social division of labour is not immediately evident, and classes generalize their own experiences to the totality of capitalist society.

Localist ideology is marked by the position of the petty bourgeoisie in the social division of labour. Localism is not the only ideology of this class, but its values of morality, community and voluntary simplicity appeal to a layer that internalizes the capital-labour relation and thus tends towards individualized forms of social

5 reproduction. Localism promotes small lifestyle measures to create social change, and the voluntarist, idealist nature of these schemes leads localism towards abstract utopianism, creating plans for future social orders without addressing the foundational contradictions of the present system. This combines with an undercurrent of catastrophism if the Utopian ideals appear to be failing. The contemporary obsession with proper food consumption, embodied in the figure of the locavore, provides a model of these individualized methods of social change. Ideas based in the petty bourgeoisie have achieved such prominence due in considerable measure to the decline of the labour movement.

Chapter Five criticizes the political alternatives of localist theory. As neoliberalism displaced Keynesianism, it mobilized local spaces for nonmarket socialization. Localism became a form of neocommunitarianism, using the social economy to transfer the costs of reproduction from capital onto labour. Localist social development schemes are therefore severely limited, since local economies themselves are embedded in circuits of global capital. Further left, postcapitalist localism theorizes local spaces as outside of capitalist social relations, leading it to mimic neoclassical concepts that equate the social weight of labour and capital. This creates a voluntarism most clearly articulated by Holloway, who refuses to apply capitalist laws of motion to analyses of political strategies. This promotes the concept of abstract, prefigurative politics that do not theorize collective resistance.

Counterposed to these localisms, Chapter Five demonstrates how Marxism sees capitalism socializing production through private ownership, creating potential development that is squandered in economic crisis and war. Rosa Luxemburg's

6 conception of mobilizing social movements to push the boundaries of capitalist rule provides a model for anticapitalist organizing. Similarly, the Special Diet campaign in

Ontario offers a concrete example of how mobilizing for reforms builds the political capacities of participants in a way that localist organizing for Participatory Budgeting does not. The Ontario Days of Action in 1996-97 were a limited application of mass movement mobilization against neoliberalism. Aspects of the ongoing global justice movement show how small, local actions can be connected into opposition to global capitalism as a whole. These instances show that local spaces are vital for social movements, providing they are connected to a critique of capitalist political economy.

This dissertation adopts an inductive methodology, beginning with theoretical propositions grounded in historically verifiable reality. This has three premises: empirical knowledge of the subject matter, its contextualization within capitalist social relations, and the notion that the social phenomenon "whose development is to be revealed in its inner necessity by dialectical deduction has in fact reached a certain level of maturation."

This is how Marx accounts for the genesis of the money-form in Capital Volume One

(Therborn "Science" 47), and this dissertation's chapter structure traces a similar route.

Chapters One and Two place localist theory within the history of capitalist economics and politics, while Chapters Two and Three develop its empirical grounding. Chapters

Four and Five demonstrate how localist ideology corresponds to an economy based on petty-commodity production, not the social production and coordination of a developed capitalism.

Marx applied the concept of the dialectic to historical analysis, creating an anti-

7 mechanical methodology that this dissertation follows. Ricardo saw the inner pattern of determination as fixed, while for Marx that pattern was contradictory and always developing (46). Therefore Marx was concerned with systemic development and change, not the operation of fixed variables, "[i]n order to grasp the world as a structured unity in auto-development through its inner contradictions" (46). Marx was not just relating concepts or searching for the source of historical forms but trying to determine how an entire social system develops according to the "inner necessity" of its laws (47).

Accordingly, this dissertation studies how the inner necessity of capitalist laws determines the outer limits for localist theory and development schemes. Marx tries to understand the appearance of capitalist social relations at its most fundamental, in the form of value, and applies it so "we can understand how these [social and economic] forms appear, what conditions are necessary for their reproduction, what laws govern their development and limit their movement" (Murray "Part One" 115). Those theories that stay at the level of appearance, such as localism, are then open to criticism.

Therborn explains, "[t]he subsequent process of abstraction and analysis is based on the problems and self-criticism of present-day society." The social laws are first delineated in Chapter One. Chapters Two and Three criticize localism by examining its practical schemes, and Chapter Four examines the social basis for localist ideology. By doing so, this dissertation helps "elucidate the ideal logical structure of present-day society" within "the essential historical determinancy of the concepts" involved: the immanent capitalist laws of motion. Concrete reality is "now grasped as a totality of multiple determinations, [and] the methodological circle is closed" by the political effects

8 of these propositions in Chapter Five (44). Through these methods, localism is theorized as an internally contradictory set of propositions that have not surpassed the insights developed by the theorists of the petty bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Marx's critique of political economy remains the most precise way to both apprehend social reality and propose strategic questions about how to change it.

9 CHAPTER ONE: LOCALISM AND CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Localism is an ideology that suggests social change happens most effectively at the micro level, by re-organizing the economy to meet social need. Localism identifies some of the consequences of capitalist development, including concentration of production and corporate ownership and unsustainable resource use. However, localism addresses symptoms and not causes of systemic crises and can only suggest partial reforms in response. In doing so, localism bases itself on Ricardo's premises of classical political economy and Proudhon's schemes for distributional reform.

The link that connects classical political economy to much of localist theory is a particular version of the labour theory of value, which equates the price of labour with the price of its commodities. From this premise, local schemes for equal exchange appear viable, along with the idea that capitalist economies can change by adjusting distribution through consumption reform. However, these premises misunderstand the nature of value in capitalism. Since exploitation happens at the point of production, and not in distribution, consumption reform does not account for, and cannot displace, capital's drive to create SNALT and the subsequent necessity of the capitalist marketplace, nor can it anticipate the twin dynamics of centralization and crisis.

What is the local?

While defining itself as a movement against excessive growth, localism does not provide a clear explanation for the appropriate size of development. In the Hundred Mile

Diet, Smith and MacKinnon define it as the local watershed (16), but all watersheds are not capable of growing the same crops or providing the same raw materials. A similar

10 lack of definition hampers the localist praise of community, whose borders are never clarified. Pro-market localists support local businesses, but a small enterprise may not local if its owner lives elsewhere; conversely, people who live, work and consume locally may by hired by a foreign-owned business. Even a small business that has local owners, workers and customers may rely on machines, vehicles, fuel, packaging and credit systems built by big, extra-local corporations. Commodities have to be made, processed, distributed and sold, in a process involving other commodities and labor from across the globe. A local point-of-sale does not, in of itself, create the local. These definitional problems suggest that the local, as a category, is too imprecise to clarify the boundaries of localism. The local is a space distinct from regional, national and international spaces.

However, those local spaces are relational: capital and workers flow through localities on their way to other localities or become fixed points of globe-straddling production and finance networks.1 This defines the local as a node of those vast networks, as Marx described in The Communist Manifesto : "In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations (Marx and Engels 39).

1 Economic geography, as a field, has defined the local through debates on scale. Delaney and Leitner, and Marston in a separate literature review, trace those debates' history from the early 1990s, as scale changed from a simple territoriality to the social construction of political and economic power, culture and ideology, Sagar (3, 7, 31) details the vast literature on the construction of the local through neoliberal policy (e.g. Brenner and Theodore 2002, Harvey "Brief History"), through which local elites, urban planners and municipal administrators implement market discipline in areas as diverse as water supply and public space management. These concepts underlie this dissertation's definition of the local as socially constructed by capital flows; however, this work is a critique of localism's contradictory conceptions of the local and thus is limited to highlighting some of those inconsistencies. For an overview of the localist literature of scale, broadly sympathetic with what it calls "intentional", or activist-led localism, see North (2010).

11 What is localism?

Despite this imprecision, localists share a vision for a society transformed through smaller structures of self-governance and enterprise. Pro-market localists suggest market regulation can create ethical local capitalism. For example, Shuman, McKibben and Estill focus on building ethical small enterprises, which Daly systemizes as ecological economics. Further left, Kingsolver and Smith and MacKinnon, while not opposed to small business, shift the focus to non-profit and cooperative efforts, as well as to individual consumer activism to support local economies. Anti-market localists loosely aligned with anarchism posit localism as a means for radical social transformation, by breaking up large-scale productive and social organization and creating completely new political structures of self-governance. These include Participatory Economics (Parecon),

Libertarian Municipalism (LM) and postcapitalism. These approaches all view the size of production and distribution as the chief cause of alienation and environmental damage and respond by advocating the decentralization of economic decision-making power.

Localism's intellectual roots can be traced back to classical political economist

Adam Smith, who suggested that commercial society would exhaust its natural resources and achieve a "stationary state." Maithus, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill all believed that social surplus would be used up by rent and subsistence, leaving no profit or growth

(Daly 3). Schumacher synthesized many of these themes in his 1973 book Small is

Beautiful, reviving the notion of steady-state economics as a positive outcome, denouncing growth for growth's sake and suggesting that neoclassical economics eliminates quality in favour of quantity: "the total suppression of qualitative distinctions,

12 while it makes theorizing easy, at the same time makes it totally sterile" (Schumacher

32). Without distinguishing between what is good for a firm and what is good for society,

"the idea that there could be pathological growth, unhealthy growth, disruptive or destructive growth is to [the economist] a perverse idea which must not be allowed to surface" (33). This is a clear invocation of the Marxist critique of the growth imperative inherent to capitalism, and Schumacher agrees that the "idea of conducting the entire economy on the basis of private greed, as Marx well recognized, has shown an extraordinary power to transform the world" (214). As part of this greed, capital creates externalities, refusing to pay for the social and ecological impact of production (31). A recent UN survey suggests that, were the ecological externalities of large corporations monetized, they would cost $2.2 trillion (U.S.) per year, plunging many profitable firms into loss (Jowit "World's"). However, greed is also personal. Unchecked growth affects the soul: prosperity "in the modern sense... is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man" (Schumacher 19). Practically, the results of this greed, as seen in urbanization and industrialism, create depressing monocultures (Norberg-

Hodge 406). Even a society with universal wealth will destroy the earth and conflict with other rich societies. Paradoxically, the rise of the Gross National Product corresponds to

"increasing frustration, alienation, [and] insecurity" (Schumacher 18). Society needs to evolve "a new life-style, with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption.... Productivity will then look after itself' (McKibben 19).

Concretely, market regulation can promote small-scale development. Daly says

13 the health of the eco-system should determine production decisions, and the "physical parameters" of the natural world should dictate the conditions under which "the nonphysical variables of technology, preferences, distribution, and lifestyles" achieve equilibrium with the ecosystem (4). By reprioritizing natural needs over social ones, populations and economies can grow to "sustainable environmental capacities" but no further (3). Drawing on steady-state economics, development "should concentrate on creating and sustaining strong communities, not creating a culture of economic individualism" (197). Known broadly as sustainable development, this ethos became popular in the 1980s through the influence of Bruntland's 1987 United Nations report

Our Common Future, which applied the conclusions of steady-state ecological economics more broadly, calling for wealth redistribution and a slower growth of population and resource use (de Stigeur 159).

There is plenty of evidence for the consequences of unrestricted growth, as industrial expansion meets absolute limits to energy and arable land use (McKibben 17).

For example, 85 percent of California water is used for agriculture, draining entire rivers

(Smith and MacKinnon 32). Massive amounts of hydrocarbons are involved in agriculture: food production and transport uses 20 percent of all U.S. fuel consumption

(Albritton 148). The result is that industrial production destroys the basis of its own existence: "[t]o use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income" (Schumacher 9).

Localism's solutions

There is an admirable invocation of solidarity at the heart of localism, based in

14 nineteenth century anarchist mutualism. In his pamphlet Mutual Aid, the anarchist Pyotr

Kropotkin praised "the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each

man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness

upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the

individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own." From this

comes an emphasis on self-reliance between people: "[i]t is... obvious that men

organized in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources

than anonymous companies or megalomaniac governments" (Schumacher 22). Due to

problems of large-scale political representation, "once government reaches a certain size,

it becomes hard to imagine that the individual citizen matters" (McKibben 169).

If size is the problem, local production and organization is the answer: we must

"shift to economies that are more local in scale." These economies rely on fewer inputs,

damage the environment less and make local communities more human-scale (McKibben

105). Against the homogenizing, anti-community forces of globalization, the "extra-

economic connections" of mutual aid form the basis for communities to resist capitalist

degradation (Carrlson 4). Community economics can be a bulwark against industrial

development (Kovel 178). For pro-market localists, local economies can produce

products, fuel and food instead of importing them. By exporting savings, "[e]normous

new wealth is possible by nurturing those businesses with greater multipliers, better

environmental and labor standards, deeper ties to the community... Every community has

rich gushers of wealth waiting to be tapped in its backyard" (Shuman 213). Likewise, for

anti-market localists, even small actions like "[c]ommunity gardening, alternative fuels,

15 and bicycling" can provide "a positive ecological vision with practical local behaviors" and represent "an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated, collective research and development effort exploring a potentially post-capitalist, post-petroleum future"

(Carrlson 45). Pro- or anti-market, all localists believe that decentralization and smallness are virtues in of themselves.

However, all localisms are hampered by a lack of insight into the motive forces driving capitalist development. It is here where Marx's insights into the social relation of capital provide a materialist explanation for the environmental damage and alienation that localists observe. Marx shows that capitalism develops as a system of internally contradictory drives. In doing so, he elucidates three important concepts: the distinction between abstract and concrete labour, how labour produces value and the role of exchange in a capitalist economy. To explore these, it is necessary to trace the models that preceded Marx.

The development of classical political economy

A theory of value must show how wealth is created in a given social form.

Classical economics expressed this by trying to determine how values are expressed as prices. Economists debated whether surplus value was generated in the realm of capital circulation through unequal exchange, buying low and selling high as the early

Mercantilists thought, or in production through some form of exploitation, as the

Physiocrats believed (Howard and King 72). Adam Smith was the first major political economist to posit a labour theory of value, in which a commodity attains value from the quantity of labour needed to make it. However, Smith could not account for the existence

16 of capital advanced to cover production costs, nor the rent accruing to landlords. He thus fell back on an adding-up theory of value, which apportioned it to labour, capital and rent respectively. This placed rent and profit outside of history, simply accepting them as given instead of tracing their source (75).

David Ricardo saw this as a contradiction and counter-posed an embodied labour theory of value in which the value of commodities depends on the amount of concrete labour they contain, "strictly proportional to the labour embodied in them in the production process" (Hunt 100). He dealt with two major objections to the labour theory of value. Firstly, since different types of commodities take more or less labour to produce, Smith felt they could not be equated. In response, Ricardo viewed the production process in terms of time: all labours could be reduced to units of unskilled labour. Added together, "[sjkilled labour could thereby be reduced to a multiple of simple unskilled labour in calculating the total labour embodied in a commodity" (102).

The second objection was that capital and natural resources increase the value of commodities beyond what labour alone contributes. Ricardo countered that capital and natural resources are only tools in commodity production, and capital and rent are products of past labour. Ricardo described how the exchange value of stockings was far more than the finished product, and included labour involved in all parts of the production process: growing the cotton, transporting it to the mill and so on. "The aggregate sum of these various kinds of labour determines the quantity of other things for which these stockings will exchange" (Ricardo 26). However, by assuming quantities of labour embodied in commodities could be measured directly, Ricardo assumed capital

17 was a use-value: capital goods, the "produced means of production" of tools and machinery, not a social relation of ownership and power (66). Value could be measured directly and capitalism could be reformed by redistributing market goods.

Marx saw that the classical labour theory of value still contained a contradiction.

Ricardo measured the value of all commodities by another commodity: labour. So "either labour sold at its value, in which case the labour theory of value was vacuous; or it did not, and the sale of the commodity in terms of which value is defined violated the law of value" (Howard and King 92). As Marx argued, this is "moving in a vicious circle... determin[ing] relative value by a relative value which itself needs to be determined"

("Poverty" 48). To create an internally consistent value theory, Marx began by identifying different kinds of labour.

The nature of labour and labour-power

Marx defined labour as "a productive activity that assimilated particular natural materials to particular human requirements." This appropriation was universal, "a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature" (133). But he refined this concept further. Classical political economy assumed workers were paid the market price for their labour, and Marx agreed. The labour market "is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham...

They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will" ("Capital Volume One" 280). However, this did not explain how commodities attain their value. Their value is not measured by

18 the concrete labour they contain, "but by the quantity of living labour necessary to produce it." Workers do not sell their labour, but their capacity to work, and their willingness to spend time working. In other words, "[w]hat the worker is selling is his labour-power... Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself' ("Capital Volume One" 677).

There are two different types of labour. Marx defined concrete labour as work that produces "specific use values such as clothes, food, books, and so on" (Saad-Filho "Anti-

Capitalism" 28). All objects have use-values: the concrete, sensuous, material qualities that define the usefulness of a thing. However, in a society where all production is distributed through unplanned and competitive market mechanisms, commodities must take the form of units of a single quantity in order to exchange, even though they are qualitatively different things (Marx "Capital Volume One" 141). Therefore a commodity, with particular use-value qualities, comes to embody a second kind of labour: abstract labour (Saad-Filho "Anti-Capitalism" 28). As a result of this abstraction, the useful quality of what a particular worker does is irrelevant: "no specific act of labour can be assumed to represent the social average... no individual act of labour can be the measure of its own social value" (McNally "Against" 156). Instead, the value of abstract labour is a fraction of how much is produced in an average work day: "we would not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything"

(Marx "Poverty" 47). The only thing objects have in common is being a product of

19 human labour, quantified through abstract units of labour time.

This abstraction is value, the first historical premise of capitalist commodity production (Marx "Capital Volume One" 141). Value arises when things exchange, not on the basis of their use, but in abstraction from their use, when one commodity's value is expressed using another. Value is made of "crystals of this social substance" - abstract human labour - and measured "by means of the quantity of the 'value-forming substance', the labour, contained in the article" (129). The "natural form" of commodity

B disappears under the gaze of commodity A, whose reflection blots out its remaining natural form (144). In every case, what is hidden is the historical nature of value: a relative commodity "expresses its value-existence as something wholly different from its substance and properties, as the quality of being comparable with a coat for example; this expression itself therefore indicates that it conceals a social relation" (149). It was this concealment that led classical economics to mistake the expression of value, price, for value itself, and let Ricardo naturalize exploitation.

Like Smith and Ricardo, Marx agrees that labour is the source of all value.

However, only labour power is the source of surplus value. Unlike any other commodity, labour-power creates more value than it requires to reproduce itself. Marx recognized the difference between the labour that workers do and the time workers needed to reproduce themselves, to enable them to continue working. To produce the labour-commodity, it requires just "enough labour time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labour, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labour is no other than the wage minimum" ("Poverty" 44).

20 The capitalist owns the means of production and pays workers a portion of the labour they have produced previously as a wage, leaving a remainder or a surplus. Even if workers received the full value of what they produce, "the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them" (728). Unpaid surplus labour, hidden from the marketplace, is not simply a technical problem: it underpins value production and therefore the whole of capitalist society. Commodities gain their value by embodying the abstract units of socially necessary labour, which are not quantifiable in concrete terms.

Marx's critique of equal exchange

Marx's concept of abstract labour allowed him to move beyond criticisms of the market in labour, which, as he pointed out, was perfectly fair already. Marx described this average more concretely as Socially Necessary Abstract Labour Time (SNALT): the average amount of time it takes to produce a commodity, given the particular social, economic and cultural conditions of the workers involved. Capitalists push to create the conditions to produce below the average global determination of SNALT. If a commodity embodies less value but sells at the same market price, capitalists can generate surplus profits from its sale. The surpluses generated from these sales can be put into advanced technologies to maintain production at below-market values. However, other producers soon catch up, average values fall as these technologies are generalized and producers must try to beat the average once more. In industries producing below market values, capitalists who fail to lower their value-per-commodity are sooner or later bankrupted or absorbed by larger ones (Fine 246).

21 This process involves a historical relationship. The market in labour power depends on pre-existing conditions: the existence of a class of workers freed from any claim on the means of production and a generalized market in commodities. Once the market in labour is established, selling one's labour power is not a choice but a compulsion and the worker is the property of the capitalist, "continually transform[ing] his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist" (Marx "Capital

Volume One" 723). From the generalized sale of labour comes generalized commodity production, markets and trade, from which SNALT can then be determined. In short, the determination of abstract labour, as portions of the entire social product created for the market, can only take place when capitalist social relations dominate all other pre- or non-capitalist relations (Saad-Filho "Anti-Capitalism" 45).

Proudhon's distributional reforms

From this historical understanding, Marx criticized Proudhon's efforts to create a market economy that measured and exchanged equal acts of concrete labour ("Poverty"

60). On this basis, Proudhon argued, the process of exchange could be perfected and workers could be paid equal wages: "society exchanges only equal products — that is, rewards no labour save that performed for her benefit; consequently, she pays all labourers equally" ("Property" 124). Since "value [is] expressed by the amount of time and outlay which each product costs, and liberty being inviolable, the wages of labourers

(like their rights and duties) should be equal." Since value came from concrete acts of labour, workers established a right to own what they produced (McNally "Against" 141).

22 Having established equal wages, Proudhon devoted the bulk of his efforts to ensuring the market would also be equal. In The General Idea of Revolution, Proudhon established the pre-conditions for fair markets: "the liquidation of debts, the organisation of credit, the derivation of the power of increase of money, the limitation of property, the establishment of workers companies and the use of a just price" would create lower prices and a "normal commercial rate" of interest (General Idea A 587). The only possible injustice in this system came from corruption by middlemen. "The price of things is not proportionate to their value: it is larger or smaller according to an influence which justice condemns, but the existing economic chaos excuses-Usury." Buying low and selling high allowed the merchant "to obtain by the excess of profit the security of which labour and exchange fail sufficiently to assure him. The profit thus obtained in excess of the cost, including the wages of the seller, is called Increase. Increase - theft - is therefore compensation for insecurity" ("General Idea" B 228). The political conclusion was clear: regulating sale and purchases and eliminating "middlemen" would create a fair price for goods, indemnify sellers against low prices and make liberty "inviolable."

Both fair wages and just prices derived from Proudhon's concept of property, which represented control over other people's labour, violating the rule of like exchanging with like: "[individual possession is the condition of social life... [while pjroperty is the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against right.

Suppress property while maintaining possession, and, by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize law, government, economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth" (285). Thus Proudhon saw his future society as a

23 series of voluntary contracts based on commodity exchange. Each person possessed enough to trade, but no more; knowledge and freedom, "the liberty of the contracting parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged" would guarantee no one's property would grow too large. Establish equal exchange, and "pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice, crime, and hunger will disappear from our midst" (286).

Marx disputed both Proudhon's analysis and the political conclusions that stemmed from it. By equating price with value, Proudhon tried to create an economy based on the exchange of concrete labours. This was based on a misunderstanding of how the capitalist market works.

First, the market operates according to "the (abstract) social value of a given hour of (concrete) labour performed" (McNally "Against" 151). As Marx explained, "the variations in supply and demand' tell the capitalist how many commodities must be produced to recoup costs ("Poverty" 55). Thus "there is no ready-made constituted

'proportional relation', but only a constituting movement" (56). The market cannot be controlled to create just exchanges: its anarchic fluctuations not only flow from the market's very existence, but are necessary for it to function because price and value do not match. Market values change regularly, such that prices provide, at best, a transient signal for how much commodities should exchange for (McNally "Against" 156). A just price cannot be based on the concrete - i.e. specific - labour-time embodied in a commodity, because concrete values are not exchanged on the capitalist market. The real value simply fluctuates above and below the actual value.

It follows that buying low and selling high does not generate new value; it simply

24 transfers value to entrepreneurs who have determined how to extort their customers. If these profits are sustained, eventually capital will also flow to those parts of the economy where higher profits are to be made, equalizing them (34). The "excessive raising of prices, overproduction and many other features of industrial anarchy have their explanation in this mode of evaluation" of value by abstract labour-time (57). The market anarchy Proudhon wanted to fix comes from the inability of capital to precisely gauge supply and demand; to reform this function of the market would require ending it.

Second, the products of concrete labour cannot be made directly equivalent, since not everyone produces similar products at the same rate and quality. Proudhon recognized this, but he could not determine how to make qualitatively different objects comparable; therefore he appealed to the workers' goodwill and hoped that those who were faster would simply choose to take time off:

Shall the labourer who is capable of finishing his task in six hours have the

right, on the ground of superior strength and activity, to usurp the task of

the less skilful labourer, and thus rob him of his labour and bread? Who

dares maintain such a proposition? He who finishes before the others may

rest... or devote himself to useful exercise and labours... but let him

confine himself to services which affect him solely (Proudhon "Property"

125).

Without this signal, Marx answered, "it will suffice to spend six hours' work on the production of an object, in order to have the right... to demand in exchange six times as much as the one who has taken only one hour to produce the same object" (57).

25 Proudhon's plea for workers to stop working early penalized them for their efficiency and thus did not provide a workable model for the generalized exchange of concrete labours.

"What is left of this 'proportional relation'?" Marx asked of Proudhon's scheme.

"Nothing but the pious wish of an honest man who would like commodities to be produced in proportions which would permit of their being sold at an honest price"

("Poverty" 58). By "suppressing] property while maintaining possession", he assumed an arbitrary line over which possessing objects became theft, based on the size of one's holdings. This was an unconscious reflection of what Marx called feudal socialism:

Proudhon took for granted a society of small producers who had the capacity to trade freely and the ability to meet everyone's needs through petty-commodity production. Yet

"Private property which is personally earned, i.e. which is based, as it were, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour,

[has been] supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour" ("Capital Volume One" 928). Proudhon refused to take into account the development of capitalism as a mode of production.2

2 These conflicts are revealed by McKay, who argues that Proudhon roots injustice in exploitation, not unequal exchange, and that rather than opposing the interests of the working class, he considered the interests of all labourers, which in mid-nineteenth century France included a majority of peasants (McKay 8-11). While this is a valiant effort at rescue, it falls short. Recognizing that labourers do not receive the whole product of their labour, as Proudhon does, takes us no further than the Smithian and Ricardian socialists of earlier decades, who would have accepted that exploitation comes from "the hierarchical relationship produced by wage-labour" (9). McKay tries to prove Proudhon had a concept of exploitation by referencing the "collective force" workers use when a "hundred men, uniting or combining their forces, produce, in certain cases, not a hundred times, but two hundred, three hundred, a thousand times as much." Therefore workers "must be paid twice, thrice or ten times their wages, or an equivalent service rendered to each one of them" (qtd. in McKay 10). However, this is not a description of exploitation but simply of a division of labour, the "union of forces" whose "application is found in every case in which individual effort, no matter how often repeated, would be ineffective" ("General Idea" A 554). It is ironic that McKay pulls a quote claiming to prove exploitation from an essay denouncing "workers' societies" (552) and "Association" i.e. a trade union, which "is not an economic force. It is in its nature sterile, even injurious, since it places fetters on the liberty of the worker" and whose advocates "have attributed, without reason or

26 The reason for Proudhon's dislike of the working class, as it is currently organized and not as a freely associated group of revolutionaries, becomes clearer. It is not, as McKay claims, simply a number's game, where Proudhon created an ideal society of small-scale producers because most people were peasants (11). Since Proudhon proceeded from an abstract, bourgeois and individual notion of liberty, he could not abide the restrictions that association created: the need for workers to act according to democratic, majority rule to defend the interests of their class. Whatever his nascent concept of exploitation, he supported the role of capital in production, since it was the lack of equal exchange, not exploitation, which made labour and capital conflict. The only political action necessary was to abolish capitalist monopoly and create truly free trade, from which equal exchange and just prices would grow naturally (McNally

"Against" 143). It followed that trade unions would raise inflation through demanding higher wages and impose unfair limits on contract rights (146).

The crucial component Proudhon missed was not hierarchy, property or even exploitation. It was the historical, generalized dispossession of the labouring population, creating a working class forced to sell its labour power, making commodities according to SNALT for a global market. Without this analysis, Proudhon could maintain a vision of petty artisanal production.

Other reformers attempted to perfect exchange. Socialists writing against Ricardo proof, a virtue and efficacy to the social contract, which belongs only to collective force, the division of labour, or to exchange" (555). AH monopolies, labour or capital, repress freedom; Proudhon tries to diminish the workers as the smallest part of the nation, denouncing the "emptiness" of the moral bond of Association, and then claiming that unions "should be judged, not by the more of less successful results which they obtain, but only according to their silent tendency to assert and establish the social republic": in other words, when they conform to his idea of liberty (558).

27 drew on Smith to suggest that surplus labour formed the basis of exploitation, and therefore workers should control the entire value of the commodities produced by their labour. Once workers were free to trade what they produced directly, the only remaining source of injustice would be unequal distribution, which could be eliminated by changing the terms of trade (Hunt 168; Howard and King 96). But the problems remained. Marx referred to Bray to explain how a fair exchange of concrete labours would work. If value equals the cost of production, then equal values can exchange for their equivalent: if "for example, it takes a hatter one day to make a hat, and a shoemaker the same time to make a pair of shoes - supposing the material used by each to be of the same value - and they exchange these articles with each other, they are not only mutually but equally benefited"

("Poverty" 62).

The parallels with Proudhon are clear: Bray could not determine how long individual hatters and shoemakers take to make their products. As Marx explained: "if all the members of society are supposed to be actual workers, the exchange of equal quantities of hours of labour is possible only on condition that the number of hours to be spent on material production is agreed on beforehand. But such an agreement negates individual exchange" (67). Equal exchange would require social production for use- values, which in turn would require social planning and the end of individual exchange, precisely what capitalism makes impossible. Perfecting a system of exchange meant trying to change a system that only functions once most people are dispossessed from the means of production and must sell their labour power on the market: in other words, when society-wide class struggle is already built into productive relations. However,

28 Marx argued, "the respectable conscience refuses to see this obvious fact... For the bourgeois, individual exchange can exist without any antagonism of classes. For him, these are two quite unconnected things" (68). Thus exchange reformers were not only drawing up plans for ideal exchange that could never be practiced successfully; they also misunderstood the entire nature of capitalism.

A brief history of capitalism

The concepts of just price and equal exchange did not begin with Proudhon: they extend back to antiquity. Aristotle promoted use-value exchange while condemning usury and money lending. In the Middle Ages, Aquinas also determined a just price for goods and attacked usury (Therborn "Science" 79). These parallels were not a coincidence; rather, they reflected a pre-capitalist economy in which the "self-regulating market did not exist" and stable production and transport methods kept prices from fluctuating (80).

However, equal exchange was being superseded by events well before Marx or

Proudhon. Trade for the exclusive pursuit of profit emerged with the advent of widespread colonization by Europeans, and mercantilist economics reflected this shift; while still viewing capital as a series of exchanges, and production as a support for distribution, it still presumed the production of goods made for sale, not for personal use

(Bukharin 29). Quesnay and the Physiocrats, who thought agriculture produced the social surplus, also assumed the production of agricultural commodities (Therborn "Science"

81). Local production for use-value was already becoming obsolete by the seventeenth century, a process reflected in classical political economy: as capital came to be the dominant social relation and organize production, Smith and Ricardo put the latter

29 process at the centre of society (Bukharin 29).

The pre-conditions for generalized simple commodity exchange disappeared entirely in the nineteenth century: large-scale industry had to produce on a mass scale and, Marx argued, could "no longer wait for demand. [In capitalism] production precedes consumption, supply compels demand." Re-establishing concrete labour exchange meant either returning to small-scale industry, a historically obsolete system of production, or enacting individual exchange with large-scale industry "with all its train of misery and anarchy" ("Poverty" 59). The development of productive forces created a world economy, which in turn forced small-scale industry to adapt to SNALT or perish. It is relatively easy to see the train of misery and anarchy but less simple to see its engine: capitalist social relations.

Once established, the capitalist mode of production must constantly expand and destroy not only previously existing modes but smaller units of capitalist production.

"Capital by its very nature tolerates no geographical limits to its expansion. Its historical ascent led to the levelling of regional boundaries and the formation of large national markets, which laid the foundation for the creation of the modern nation state" (Mandel

"Late Capitalism" 310). This expansion was accomplished through two inherent dynamics: concentration and centralization. Concentration is the process of investing profits of single capitals to create bigger firms (Fine 244). Centralization brings together many individual capitals, leading to the dominance of fewer and fewer large units in national and, eventually, international markets. Small capitals continue to exist, as we shall see in Chapter Two, but they do not have the power to direct capitalist economies

30 towards their own interests.

These two dynamics are a product of, and inseparable from, the capitalist mode of production, representing two different historical stages of development. Concentration is dominant during expanded reproduction, where surplus product is created in particular places without its production being generalized. Commodity production spreads without changing the ratio of machine to living labour (Fine 245). Centralization is a product of advanced capitalism: only established capitals need to raise productivity through large- scale production, generally using machinery in factories. Another way of expressing this is that capital must raise the Technical Composition of Capital (TCC), despite the risk of this process leading to falling profits (245).3

Capital has historically centralized through two different forms: single enterprises, often supported by imperialist intervention, take over firms in other countries, or companies merge directly. It is not a process of simple growth but of agglomeration, as historically the number of firms shrank "until entire branches of industry were dominated by a handful of trusts, companies and monopolies," saturating home markets and forcing capitalists to export in search of new ones (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 311). This began as early as the nineteenth century, when capital concentrated in nationally controlled industries and finance capital pushed for investment abroad (312). The decision to remain within national boundaries was not due to capital's ethical commitment to remain small,

3 As part of the competition to lower production costs below market value, capital employs less direct labour in production, replacing human labour by machinery. The technical composition of capital (TCC) represents the ratio between the physical means of production and direct, human labour. While most commentators rely on the Organic Composition of Capital (OCC) to express this relationship, OCC actually represents the use values changed by TCC (Fine 245). To avoid confusion, this dissertation refers to the latter term when expressing the machine-direct labour ratio.

31 but because there were few safe venues for international investments. However, the establishment of white settler colonies enabled new direct investments outside Europe and huge profits. As colonial policy opened up these opportunities, the political maps of

Europe and the colonial world were redrawn repeatedly through two world wars as different powers jockeyed for political and economic influence. The quest for international spheres of influence and markets played a key, although not exclusive role in driving this process (313).

After the Second World War, capital continued to centralize internationally for two reasons. Firms created excess capacity to dominate home markets, saturating them; they were forced go abroad to realize the value they had already invested (Mandel

"Marxist" 521). Nationally-based firms were also not large enough to muster the capital to make the initial investments needed to coordinate production from many different countries and overcome natural barriers to production (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 317).

Firms made massive outlays on research and development, introducing new products at a volume large enough to maintain sales and justify expenditures. This created what

Mandel calls "minimal optimum capacity... a level below which unit costs of production start to increase" (317, note 17). The fact that only a small number of global firms could afford these economies of scale led to a further centralization of power and ownership and the dominance of the multinational corporation (MNC) (316). MNCs allowed capital to internationalize all phases of circulation, including the production and sale of commodities, the purchase of labour-power and ownership (324). The centralization of capital ownership increased markedly in recent years through mergers and acquisitions

32 and the unprecedented internationalization of finance (Went 343).

Together, these processes define globalization, in which nations specialize in particular industries to obtain competitive advantages, while ceding political control to international institutions and firms. This results in wealth concentrating within and between states (Daly and Farley 323).4

This process is not linear or stable. Mandel calls internationalization a partial socialization, "an attempt partially to overcome the barriers of private ownership and private appropriation for the further development of the forces of production" (342).

Private property, essential for dispossessing people from the land and creating the working class, cannot accommodate the scale of ownership necessary to maintain profitability. Capital's answer is more centralization, which simply reproduces this contradiction on a broader scale. The aggregate decisions of individual capitalists to rationalize their production have contradictory social consequences: an investment boom leads to over-production when too many capitals attempt to enter a particular sector. This leads to the devalorization of smaller capitals, and overall profit rates fall when capitalists force down production costs to stay solvent. In order to do so, capitalists must save human labour time. They do so by raising the TCC, replacing workers with machines and reducing the amount of value commodities embody. However, eliminating labour from the workplace wastes it in society as a whole, because the labour commodity remains

4 Although Daly & Farley call this an "unintended" consequence of capitalism borne out by empirical data, it is worth noting that Trotsky developed (and Marx and Engels anticipated) the concept of combined and uneven development to describe how newer capitalist nations can appropriate technology and organizational forms from more developed rivals. This question will be addressed more fully in Chapter Five.

33 unvalued, and unable to create use-values, unless it can be sold. This cannot be guaranteed, since capital can never distribute the entire surplus value created back to the working class, nor can it channel all 'excess' value back into the means of production.5

Crises result, and however much they threaten the very maintenance and expansion of capital (Howard and King 112), they remain the only way of "periodically solving the conflict between the unlimited extension of production and the narrow limits of the market" (Luxemburg "Social Reform" 91). These inherent trends within capitalism form part of a complex Mandel calls "the contradiction between the partial rationality and the overall irrationality of capitalism" ("Late Capitalism" 509). What is destructive to individuals is also necessary to restore profitability.

Consumption as a moment of the capital circuit

Marx's understanding of the dynamics of capital accumulation stands in stark contrast to Smithian socialism. The latter cannot see any inherent drives to capital, since it fails to identify the operation of value and the abstraction that determines its price. This leads inexorably to the font of Proudhonian and localist schemes: consumer reform.

These premises were developed by neoclassical economics, for which the motor force of capitalism is consumer preference (38). Therefore consumers can, through the

5 A forerunner of neoclassical economics, Say's Law, stated that the surplus value contained in commodities can be entirely realized through a sustained level of aggregate consumption: supply creates its own demand, and thus overproduction and its resulting economic crises were impossible (110; Harvey "Limits" 75). However, Marx suggested this was only possible in a barter economy, where trade consists solely of use values. "Since there is by definition no money, products can only be exchanged for other products, and the same act is simultaneously one of supply and demand" (Howard & King 111). Production is carried out for use, and the producer is indifferent as to whether any surplus production is exchanged, for all her needs are met through direct trade. The creation of money as a method of storing value creates a break between sale and purchase: time gaps can appear between transactions, "supply no longer creates its own demand, and aggregate demand may fall short of aggregate supply" (111). Crises in realization become possible, and even probable, in fully developed capitalism, because the priority is to create more surplus value, not more uses.

34 agency of their dollar, change the way goods are produced and distributed. The factors of production are distributed among wages, profit and rent, all infinitely substitutable with each other. In an economy predicated upon marginal returns to investors, surplus does not exist. Growth is an accidental by-product of production, not systemic exploitation. Most importantly, "exchange rather production... receives theoretical priority, and market transactions instead of underlying social relations... dominate the analysis" (Howard and

King 65). In theory, workers can accumulate enough wages to obtain capital: power does not exist.

Neoclassical economics treats consumption as a series of fixed exchanges (Bukharin 57) and reverses the causality of capitalist production: if

production is essentially for consumption, [then] private and concrete

labour is analytically prior to social and abstract labour, which exist only

ideally before sale. The equalization, abstraction and socialisation of

labour are contingent upon sale, and commodity values are determined by

the value of the money for which they are exchanged (Saad Filho "Anti-

Capitalism" 56).

The trade in capitalist commodities requires generalized capitalist social relations: this is what makes capitalism capital/stf. Stating that the consumption of use-values drives capitalism not only describes an earlier epoch, it replicates market ideology, grafting a technical relation on what is a "process... the production of surplus value by capitalists who employ a specific kind of labour - wage labour. This in turn presupposes the existence of a class relation between capital and labour" (Marx "Poverty" 43).

35 Marx warned, "It must never be forgotten, that in capitalist production what matters is not the immediate use-value but the exchange-value and, in particular, the expansion of surplus value" ("Surplus Value Part Two" 495). Capitalism must always be viewed from the perspective of the expansion of profit, not human need, and the "abstract categories of circulation" must be historicized within a fuller model of capitalist production ("Capital Volume One" 209 Footnote 24). The goal of pre-capitalist, petty commodity production is C - M - C: commodities are created and exchange for money, which is used to purchase other commodities. The goal of capitalist production is M - C

- C' - M': money is used to purchase Means of Production (MP) and Labour Power (LP).

Through the exploitation of LP, more value in embodied in C' than what was spent on initial amounts of MP and LP. The augmented value is realized through consumption, creating more money.

For Marx, consumption is, in economic terms, merely an expression of the law of value, according to which market prices express, imperfectly, the values embodied in commodities. He is not saying consumers' motivations are irrelevant, only that they are overdetermined by the social structure people find themselves in. Viewing workers as only consumers is, in fact, adopting the capitalist viewpoint, for whom "the total mass of all workers, with the exception of his own workers, appear not as workers, but as consumers, possessors of exchange-values (wages), money, which they exchange for his commodity" (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 390). Production "creates the material for consumption... it determines the mode of the latter i.e. its qualitative character... and it creates new needs" (Bukharin 55). The individual decisions by previous consumers and

36 producers dominate the present: "such results of individual acts as have become objective are supreme over all other partial elements" (39). This process of "becoming objective" expresses alienation, an existence where individuals are ruled by the domination of living

by dead labour. An analysis based in consumption is, in fact, a symptom of this commodity fetishism, where relations between things become independent of people

(40).6

It was this conceptualization that set Marx's vision of capitalism apart from both

the classical economists he criticized and their neoclassical successors. He proceeded

from a vision of capitalism as a single dominant relation with many interrelated parts,

based on the exploitation of value. Class relations structure consumption, both in terms of

the drive to increase surplus value at the expense of wages (capital versus labour), and in

how different fractions of the capitalist class divide the surplus between them (56). Figure

1 demonstrates the complexity of this model, showing how both production and

consumption can be seen as a moment of capital circulation (Albo "Personal

Communication").

6 For Marx, "production and consumption must be analysed as a unity", rather than counterposed. However, this does not mean the two had equal weight: "there are systematic influences on the structure and development of production that have a profound effect on how consumption is organised, what is consumed, and who consumes" (Fine and Leopold 253).

37 ' I s ' II N ' * ' x iv ii ^ Reproduction* ; w \/ 1 of LP (Labour Power) | (Wages Prime) | ^ 1) Health . ' 1) Mousing . \ 2) Education .,$? \ 2) Durable Goods \ 3) Welfare \ t • LP I Ms - Mac" C ... P ... C'- M'...

MP iii iv \ / Reproductiom / \ IVIE

i ofK (Capilal)(Capital) II '^ (CapitalIC anital Primp)Primel 1 I 1) Infrastructure c 1 1) Factories \ 2) R&D 4?/ ^ 2) Machines & / \ \ Equipment /

Figure 1

Figure 1 is a metaphor at a high level of abstraction; however, it is useful for showing economic activity as a process rather than a series of discrete activities. The circuit of commodity capital, where capital exists in the commodity-form and appears as the outcome of production, deserves special focus (Harvey "Limits" 71). Speculative capital (Ms) and bank capital (MbC) provide the initial investment to create commodities

(C) in the production process (P). More money (M Prime) is created through the appropriation of surplus value, along with commodities that embody more value (C

Prime). Commodities contain use-values, but they are made because they can generate exchange-value, and because they can embody more value than the commodities used to

38 make them (Marx "Capital Volume One" 293). They are sold in different spheres, and this form of new capital is transformed in various ways back to money capital, to become part of a new cycle of investment.

This contradiction leads to instability: realization problems can and do occur at any link in the process. But for the sake of simplicity, we can assume perfect-world conditions and that all investment in production is realized through exchange, which enables consumption.

Consumption happens in four separate, interlinked circuits. They are subsets of the two outcomes of Production (P): the creation of Labour Power (LP) and Means of

Production (MP). The compensation for LP flows into two separate circuits. In Circuit I,

LP must reproduce itself socially, through the provision of social services. These are mainly provided by taxation on workers' income, though there is a political struggle over whether workers can shift that burden onto corporations (O'Connor 140). Circuit II contains the net wages of the working class (Wages Prime) and is the focus for all consumer reform schemes. Workers spend the majority of their income on housing and durable goods. It must be emphasized that this is a circuit of exchange, which is not a measure of command over capital. It represents the reproduction of workers' own labour power.

In addition to forming Circuit II, surplus value is also "split into the different forms of profit on industrial capital, rent on land... [according to] quite different considerations": the growing consumption demands of the capitalists themselves (Harvey

"Limits" 43). Those considerations appear as the Means of Production (MP) in Circuit

39 Ill where capital reproduces itself, largely through the creation of physical infrastructure

and investment in research and development. The state, financed through taxes on

workers and corporate income, provides this funding, along with different quasi-state and

private institutions. Circuit IV is capital augmented by the application of surplus value,

replacing and expanding constant capital in the form of factories and equipment.

Underconsumption

If capitalism is a system of exchange, not production, then systemic crises can

only occur in the circuit of consumption. Marx has been interpreted as supporting this

position: capitalism is said to go into crisis when demand does not equal supply, and not

all the value that is produced can be realized through consumption. Debate has hinged

ever since on whether Marx was an "underconsumptionist" (77). However, both

production and distribution of the social product must be analyzed together. The idea of

autonomous consumers acting rationally is a neoclassical conceit; rather, supply and

demand of commodities proceeds according to factors well outside the control of those

with a wage: "the ratio of total surplus value to wages, and... the relation of the various

parts into which surplus value is split up" determine how much surplus value is

apportioned to wages (Marx qtd. in Harvey "Limits" 89).

There is a contradiction here: capitalists try to reduce wages to meet SNALT, yet

"those [capitalists] producing wage goods look to the labourers as a source of effective

demand" (90). Thus, it may be true that "consumption... provides the motive for

production through the representation of idealized human desires as specific human

wants and needs" (80). However, capitalists are under pressure to lower wages, not

40 increase workers' means to consume. Through measures like advertising and government initiatives, capital directs wages "to collectivize consumption in ways that give it the possibility to manage consumption (through fiscal policies and government expenditures) in a manner consistent with accumulation" (91). Workers' needs are structured by the demands of capital in competition with other capitals, and thus they can be seen as

"independent centre[s] of circulation" themselves, realizing exchange "between that part of capital which is specified as wages, and living labour capacity." Consumers are not a counterweight to capital accumulation but a necessity that capital is obliged to encourage.

Capital strives to reduce the value embodied in commodities through two ways: introducing machines into the production process, which creates larger volumes that need to be sold, and lowering wages, which sets limits on what consumers can purchase

(Mandel "Late Capitalism" 392). In short, "one cannot even discuss 'consumption' unless one understands the process of the reproduction of the total social capital and of the replacement of the various component parts of the social product" (Lenin "Development"

62).

Three conclusions are evident. First, commodities supply not only personal goods but state purchases and capital goods at all stages of the creation and reproduction of MP.

Marx certainly never saw private consumption goods as central for realizing value in new commodities (C'); wages are simply one way of doing so (58). The idea that workers could exercise agency over the circuit of capital through their wages alone repeats the

Ricardian error that workers receive the full value of their labour (not the price of their labour power) in production. Even if all workers were convinced that localism was a

41 valid form of consumption they could, at best, change the conditions of production for their own housing and consumer items. In fact, workers are not so important as consumers: "consumer demand has no special status in a capitalist framework... workers... will only be employed if they contribute to profits, so that both consumption and investment derive primarily from spending by capitalists which is directed to making profits" (Brewer 34). In an alienated society, all production and consumption comes from capital first.

Second, theories of underconsumption assume that the goal of production is to create consumer goods for workers, ceding ground to neoclassical theories of consumer sovereignty. "In reality, however, capitalists produce both consumer and capital goods— machinery, buildings, raw materials and the like." Only capitalists purchase the latter

(Post "Economic" 2). This productive consumption is built into the accumulation process.7 "Capitalists generate an effective demand for product as buyers of raw materials, partially finished products and various means of production." This absorbs all demand for industries making the means of production.

In fact, over time, production shifts increasingly away from workers and towards capital. Production increases as machine use increases, requiring more constant capital, more production of constant capital inputs and ultimately "a progressive shift towards the production and consumption of means of production" (Harvey "Limits" 91). The drive to replace humans with machines augments the means of production, which themselves

7 Fine and Leopold concur that productive consumption takes up an ever-increasing part of circulation. This is not "final consumption" which takes use values out of circulation entirely, but it becomes the greater part of circulation as the growth of the TCC removes living labour from production, leaving "an increasing share of the value of commodities... taken up by constant capital which is exchanged between capitals" (260).

42 must be replaced. Any surplus unable to be absorbed by productive consumption can be realized by luxury consumption by capitalists themselves, and that portion gets larger as the inherent trend towards expansion widens (92). If the definition of 'luxury' was broadened to include goods like organic produce, which require labour-intensive production, it is theoretically possible that this could shift consumer power away from capital goods. However, this would spark underconsumption problems for capital goods makers themselves, whose products could not be made labour-intensively (Tufts).

Third, money capital is present in every circuit: it not only provides starting capital but directly stimulates circulation of workers' wages through personal credit and capital through financial institutions, particularly as many industrial enterprises have internalized finance as a major part of their operations (McNally "Financial Crisis" 5). To influence this process, consumers would have to find some way of controlling the investment decisions at all stages of capital circulation, including private consumption and state purchase of goods; otherwise, the compulsion to pursue SNALT would make finance pull investment dollars from more expensive, less technically developed industries.

Conclusion

Viewing capitalism as a neutral market for the distribution of use-values "is accepting the present state of affairs; it is, in short, making an apology, with M.

Proudhon, for a society without understanding it" (Marx "Economic" 55).8 No localist

g When theories of consumption rest on final consumption, rather than the exchange value of the commodity, there are political consequences. Since final consumption removes use values from circulation, the laws of capital no longer govern its behaviour and consumers matter only for the money they bring to

43 has ever answered the critique Marx made of classical political economy and Proudhon.

The commodity labour-power creates more value than is needed to reproduce it: this is the source of surplus value and profit in capitalist society. Acts of concrete labour cannot be equated: they are reduced to units of abstract labour. Equal exchange is not possible because the capitalist market determines market values via an imprecise system of supply and demand. Capitalist production centralizes, getting bigger and more powerful to defeat smaller competitors. This entire process is unstable, as the market mechanism means values cannot always be realized, and the resulting crises threaten the viability of the capitalist system as a whole. Personal consumption, embodying the hopes of equal exchange reformers, is not an independent realm but a sphere of capital circulation that is, at best, a minor part of capitalist consumption as a whole.

Localism has grown out of the experience of environmental crises and alienation, yet it has not moved beyond Marx's critique of Smith, Ricardo and Proudhon. Marx may have engaged the latter in bitter intellectual and political warfare, but he would have granted them one concession: they gave an honest account of their political economy.

They all thought it was essential to explain how value was created and the role of labour in that process. It was a neoclassical innovation to decide that question was no longer important and to ignore value theory in favour of technical questions of exchange.

Localism shares its refusal to provide a systematic explanation of its origins and the the exchange, not their class location as workers (Fine and Leopold 262). Capital and wage labour disappear. Collapsing spheres I through IV not only loses analytical clarity; with the failure of this distinction, "it is as though consumption, through its origins in exchange via money, were constituted on a foundation of simple commodity production alone" (261). The parallel's with Proudhon's vision of an artisanal society are unmistakeable: there are no workers, no exploitation, 'capital without capitalism'. This theoretical point has practical implications: if consumption is given autonomous analytic significance, the entire political edifice of Marxian politics, premised on the centrality of the working class, falls apart.

44 motor force of value. Localist theory is unaware of this theoretical lineage, which undermines its specific schemes for change.

45 CHAPTER TWO: THE APPLICATION OF PRO- AND ANTI-MARKET LOCALISM

Localism does not have a theory of value. Unable to explain how wealth is produced, localism tries to overcome the effects of capitalist growth in two different ways. Pro- market localists suggest market regulation can create ethical local capitalism. By virtue of their small size, firms will treat workers and the environment better. Local business can keep money circulating locally through the support of ethical consumers. Anti-market localism, on the other hand, suggests that committed individuals can transcend capitalism through the use of simple technologies and free labour. Exchanges of concrete labours, alternative currency and credit schemes are proposed as ways to create direct, ethical trade that benefits local communities. All of these concepts ignore to the inherent drive of capital to accumulate, expand and go into crisis. These structural constraints limit the ability of localism to create new, ethical networks of production and distribution.

Localists recognize that exchange value has colonized use value. McKibben quotes a Wal-Mart official who explains commodification: "The same principles of value, price, and quality that apply to things like television sets also apply to food." (53).

Small businesses must deal with the same dynamic: where large production units have socialized their costs, they have established a minimum level of profitability that all businesses must meet (Carrlson 177). That ruthless logic is indifferent to the ethical impulse of local enterprise:

the well-known difficulties that face any small business (shortage of

capital, insufficient markets, limited advertising budgets, etc.) are not

overcome by 'caring and trust,' even if community and integrity can be

46 sold to specific marketplace niches.... The iron rule of the market is

inflexible and unforgiving. Grassroots biofuel pioneers face the classic

capitalist dictum - grow or die! (Carrlson 178)

The need to accumulate structures all attempts to overcome capitalist social relations through setting up competing firms. However, despite these systemic criticisms, localism continues to place its hopes in small alternatives. This is due to its pre-Marxian conception of capitalist economy as a set of use-values.

Localism and value

The localists, just like the classical political economists, are searching for an explanation of value. Their inability to distinguish use from exchange-value means they make the same error as Ricardo and Proudhon, relying on either technical or idealist concepts to explain the existence of production and trade. Estill feels that "trade is based on 'things', not money, and as long as we can create things, like food, or fuel - or as long as we can offer services of value - like massage or art, our self reliance will be readily apparent" (175). Schumacher calls capital "a large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc" (4). Capital is a thing, to be compared, discounted and valued according to other things.

There are two consequences to repeating Proudhon's error. First, it creates a casual dismissal of Marx's more profound analysis. According to Schumacher, humanity's inability to appreciate the natural world does not come from inherent dynamics of growth but hubris: "we are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as

47 valueless everything that we have not made ourselves" (4). Schumacher faults both neoclassical economics and Marx for failing "to distinguish between income and capital", the latter being "the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and without which he can do nothing" (4). The capital of the natural world becomes a bigger version of human capital: "far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man"

(5). Apparently Marx fell into this trap, making a "devastating error when he formulated the so-called 'labour theory of value'" (4). However, this confuses wealth with value.

Marx saw nature as a source of wealth along with human labour, but value can only arise when humans "change the form of [natural] materials". He states explicitly that labour "is therefore not the only source of material wealth i.e. of the use-values it produces... labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother" ("Capital Volume One" 134). The fact that Marx named "mother" earth as a source of wealth shows his appreciation for the relation between humanity and nature, but his insistence on value as solely a human phenomenon shows how natural wealth is always appropriately socially. However, the charge of overvaluing humans reveals the binary at the heart of Schumacher's economics: against those who appear to devalue the products of nature, he simply revalues them.

The absence of the social relation of capital, the motive force behind this devaluation, leads Schumacher to a second, much broader problem: capital can be changed through moral regulation. Since "modern economics... considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production - land, labour and capital - as the means," his Buddhist economics "tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to

48 maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort" (41). As Chapter One showed, the "sole end and purpose" of capitalist production is not the desires of consumers but the realization of value. Without an alternative explanation, Schumacher must base his economics on a morality that he hopes others will share. Once freed of the wrong impulses, the proper balance of "planning and freedom" can be created; "it is essential that there should be full managerial responsibility and authority; yet it is equally essential that there should be a democratic and free participation of the workers in management decisions" (217). These can be reconciled: a "generous and magnanimous intellectual effort... can enable a society... to find a middle way that reconciles the opposites without degrading them both" (218). The managerial task of imposing labour discipline to make profits disappears in the quest for a third way.

Schumacher maintains steady-state economics is viable because it is wiser, based on a shared morality (24). To create such an economy, enterprises must not grow too big; therefore Schumacher proposes that workplace investment be equal to average annual earnings "of an able and ambitious industrial worker" (21). This also follows Ricardo by assuming wages comprise the entire value that a worker creates. Yet, as Chapter One demonstrated, firms must reduce the amount of labour embodied in their commodities and increase the surplus value appropriated from each worker. They do so in order to grow; otherwise competitors that can produce cheaper commodities will drive them to bankruptcy. In short, a steady-state capitalism is an internally contradictory concept.

This reification gets repeated in Daly's ecological economics, where he suggests technical ways to check growth, by including "natural capital" as part of annual national

49 incomes and balance of payments, including externality costs as part of assessing development projects, taxing resources rather than incomes, shifting development focus to renewing long-term natural resources and returning to national development strategies

(92). These are all worthy goals, but they are unrealizable without changing capital's drive to externalize costs. Therefore he suggests that "sustainability is the criterion for scale" of economies while "justice is the criterion for distribution." He acknowledges that these "obviously, are not matters of market economics; rather, they are biophysical and cultural. They must be socially and politically determined." But even while posing a social basis for property, as with Proudhon, the market is left as a neutral distributive mechanism: "given these prior social decisions on scale and distribution, the market will determine allocatively efficient prices" (Daly 364). Values will be imposed, while the market will accept and implement the imposition.

Schumacher worked for the British Coal Board, and it is significant that both he and Daly are economists who have attempted to criticize their chosen field from the inside: both see the problems of unrestrained use of natural resources, but they are also trapped by their conception of capital as an object, natural or human-made, rather than a social relation. They are not questioning the foundations of economics, just the fact that its principles lead to growth. The social relation of the commodity labour power, which for Marx was key to understanding the nature of value in capitalism, is absent in localist literature.

Pro-market localism

On this basis, it follows that many localists support the market. Despite agreeing

50 with "the argument for fairness", McKibben argues that "a program of redistribution,

however wise or moral, will do relatively little to deal with the even more fundamental,

and much less discussed, problems that a growth-centered, efficiency-obsessed economy

faces" (14). McKibben suggests that "[sjhifting our focus to local economies will not

mean abandoning Adam Smith or doing away with markets. Markets, obviously, work.

Building a local economy will mean, however, ceasing to worship markets as infallible

and consciously setting limits on their scope" (3). Petrini hastens to assure his readers that

"it is not my intention to denounce the capitalist system in itself' (165). Markets can be subordinated: "The goal of efficient allocation requires the instrument of the market, at

least for goods that are private," while sustainable economics and fair distribution of

goods means "the market comes third, after its preconditions have been established"

(Daly and Farley 363). It is never mentioned how the giant firms that ogilopolize the

market will accept being relegated to third place. Rather than redistributing wealth, existing market relations can be maintained. Planning fewer, better-quality use-values will check unplanned growth: "we need to move decisively to rebuild our local economies. These may well yield less stuff, but they produce richer relationships; they

may grow less quickly, if at all, but they make up for it in durability" (McKibben 3). As

McKibben admits, "such a shift is neither 'liberal' or conservative'" and contrasts economies which attempt to increase production to those which build community values

(3). The answer is simply to make less, something everyone can agree with: we should

"make the economy less efficient", a change which is not "ideological" and will gain support from conservatives and environmentalists (120).

51 The idealization of small business

Having established the market as a positive force, localists can claim that ethical businesses are "automatically small-scale, personal, and local" (Shuman 41). Size automatically means "separating the producer from the consumer, the banker from the depositor, the worker from the owner" whereas "small is the scale of efficient, dynamic, democratic and environmentally benign societies" (Morris 438). Shuman suggests that

"when we move from small-scale to medium-scale, the connection between ownership and work already becomes attenuated; private enterprise tends to become impersonal", while "a business can only be considered locally owned if those who control it live in that community" (41). Schumacher say it is the impersonal nature of big business that causes greed. An owner only "becomes exploitative if he appropriates profit in excess of a fair salary to himself and a return on his capital no higher than current rates borrowed from outside sources" (223).

This confusion ends with the capitalists solving the problems their very existence poses. In fact, by creating and distributing fewer goods, the market can add value to previously free items, protecting them (Daly and Farley 364). Anything extra the owner earns "should be shared with all members of the organization. If they are 'ploughed back', they should be 'free capital' collectively owned, instead of accruing automatically to the wealth of the original owner." In these circumstances, labour exploitation no longer matters: "even autocratic control is no serious problem in a small-scale enterprise which, led by a working proprietor, has almost a family character" (Schumacher 223).

McKibben calls for more capitalists; indeed, "the process [of localized development]

52 could be speeded up... for instance, hundreds of millions of squatters and black-market business owners could get an immediate boost of capital if their governments simply deeded them the land they already occupy and granted them licenses" (209). In this definition, a capitalist is simply an entrepreneur who is held back by public land ownership and red tape.

Like Fourier, who appealed to the wealthy to fund his schemes, the localists cite examples of good capitalists who "have voluntarily abandoned the chance of becoming inordinately rich." Most rich "corrupt themselves by practising greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy" (236). Yet one capitalist "refused to become inordinately rich and thus made it possible to build a real community" (237). McKibben lauds a Chinese rabbit-farmer who, inspired by an aid group that gave him start-up capital

(i.e. rabbits), "then became a kind of philanthropist, spending most of his wealth and time training others" (207). Capitalism will change because new, equitable laws and customs will be created. Enlightened small businesspeople can divest themselves of their holdings and give ownership to their employees (Schumacher 234). In every case, profit is made optional by caring about the proper, local size.

Shuman suggests that a local "entrepreneur's family, workers, and customers are woven into the fabric of the community" and are less likely to leave (46). Their close connections will encourage various forms of trust between economic actors, a key component of social capital theory (Torche and Valenzuela 187). Local businesses will be less likely to close down and move to new, cheaper sites, where a local community can

"better shape its laws, regulations, and business incentives to protect the local quality of

53 life" and overseas relocation is less likely (47). In each case, a firm's size makes it more amenable to providing use values. Market compulsion is either absent from the debate, or it works in favour of localism: "good old fashioned greed will play its role [in the transition to community values]: every time a barrel of oil rises another dollar, someone else figures out how to make a buck with small hydro plants or community-scale windmills" (McKibben 172). The market will work when it suits the local economy, and be abandoned when it does not, as we must discuss "giving up some measure of efficiency for other values... As this effort spreads, our politics will eventually start to change as well" (175). Those other values include promoting the community over the

"hyper-individual", contrasting growth to a "more locally rooted" economy (196). Petrini advocates "friendship and the joining of forces over economic competition, the public over the private, the gift over trade" (183). Freed from both bureaucratic barriers, let alone the compulsion of SNALT, capitalists will develop a sense of social responsibility.

The parallels with Proudhon's ethical artisans are clear. The social relations of capitalism either do not exist, cannot change or do not have to: the trajectory of economic growth can be reversed without fundamental social change. There is nothing inherently exploitative in production, as "in small-scale enterprise, private ownership is natural, fruitful, and just." It is only when, "in large-scale enterprise... functionless owners... live parasitically on the labour of others" that injustice results (225). The problem is not the capital relation, but the way it is implemented. We can see the echoes of Ricardian reformers trying to redistribute the surplus, while Proudhon would agree that

"functionless owners" cause injustice. By remaining in the community, owners will find

54 "a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy." This will not be a product of changing political power but"creating those values, and the laws and customs " that McKibben calls "the key task of our time" (210).

The viability of small-scale production

The hyperbole demonstrates that, in calling for a shift to local economies, localists actually are calling for something much more fundamental: a revolution in values. It is worth examining in depth, then, how small-scale production works within a developed capitalist economy.

There is a key confusion at the heart of localism: it conflates the size of production with the size of ownership. For example, Schumacher writes that a localist, capitalist society could rely on "the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination" (Schumacher 48). In fact, this is possible today without localism: while the centralization of production concentrates machinery and labor power, the centralization of ownership does not. In fact, smaller forms of workplace organization, using high-tech production, are central to the neoliberal project, allowing owners to break up concentrations of workers and reduce their bargaining power. Creating "small autonomous units" is completely compatible with the kind of massive, corporate centralization that Schumacher decries.

Capital must revolutionize the means of production in "an ever more rapid change in the methods of production and of investment" (Luxemburg "Reform" 71). Firms must

55 reduce the amount of value embodied in commodities to lower their costs below SNALT, decreasing the amount of value in individual commodities and allowing large enterprise to undercut competitors. This creates ever-larger firms able to withstand the competitive pressures. However, capitalist crises also cause regular depreciations of existing capital, creating openings for smaller capitals to create new forms of production.

This process works unevenly through spatial fixes, the movement of capital into particular spaces to resolve crises in other ones. This can take many forms, such as infrastructure investment, or the import of capital and labour into local spaces (Harvey

"Limits" 427). Local firms and spaces are not automatically swamped by capital from foreign ones; what defines these varied strategies, however, is that they are temporary. As

Harvey argues, "regional economies are never closed. The temptation for capitalists to engage in interregional trade, to lever profits out of unequal exchange and to place surplus capitals wherever the rate of profit is highest is in the long run irresistable [sic]"

(417). As soon as capital begins to spread, localities have to deal with SNALT generated according to the global market, and the prospect of further restructuring, either their own or their competitors. Small firms in local spaces are subject to the law of value.

This is not to deny the central role that small business plays in contemporary

American capitalism. In 2007, almost 22 million Americans were self-employed, while

5.4 million businesses employed 20 workers or less, generating 49 percent of all new jobs. This compared to just over 18,000 firms of 500 or more employers, meaning small firms collectively made up 99.7 percent of employers, not including unpaid volunteer and household work or the informal market. As Luxemburg argues, "If small capitalists are

56 the pioneers of technical progress, and if technical progress is the vital pulse of the capitalist economy, then it is manifest that small capitalists are an integral part of capitalist development." However, in the long run, small capital loses, as spatial fixes lose coherency, the minimum amount of capital necessary for new business increases, and the time available for smaller capital to invest decreases. Moreover, the tendency of profit-rates to fall means small capitals, with lower operating reserves, are at greater risk of being driven bankrupt (91). Luxemburg calls the process "a periodic mowing down of small capital, which rapidly grows up again only to be mowed down once more by large industry" (71). Small-scale ownership remains viable, but only within the context of its periodic destruction.

The limits of small business ownership are suggested by the trajectory towards monopoly. Centuries ago, Smith "felt that the competitive market of small buyers and sellers (where no single individual could by himself determine prices) would self-regulate to keep these at bay" (Kovel 177). Smith was generalizing his observations of the small firms of his era, whereas monopoly capitalist enterprises have been growing since at least

1870 (Baran and Sweezy 225). As early as 1973, monopoly corporations employed a third of all American workers (O'Connor 16). Using Shuman's own statistics, that proportion has grown from a third to over half.

An indicator of this process is massive spending on technology: global research and development spending amounted to over $1.1 trillion USD in 2009, and that number is predicted to increase in 2010 (Grueber and Studt 3). Much of this research involves international collaboration by states, individual researchers and firms locating across

57 borders (23). The international space station and CERN are just two examples where many countries have collaborated to pool research resources (CERN; Klotz). This is due to the pressure for centralization: developing new technology and infrastructure is often too expensive for individual firms or states (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 317). For example, the level of machinery and amount of capital needed to create solar panels involves massive financing that would be impossible to muster locally. The Chinese government's Golden Sun program provides direct per-watt subsidies for all solar panel producers, as well as absorbing 70 percent of plant-building costs. This includes a billion dollar investment for a single plant (Cleantech "LDK"; Cleantech "New").

Small businesses may create a new market or operate in the niches of an existing one, but they cannot displace highly capitalized and centralized firms. They also face technical problems. When commodities embody higher amounts of value than products made with less living labour, they depend on high-cost, niche markets to realize that value, reducing the number of potential consumers. Small units have to create their own production chains, have less access to credit and use more energy than large ones (Albo

"Limits" 14). Shuman argues that local businesses "tend to be small, [so] they can fit more easily inside homes or on the ground floor of residences... [and] are easily accessible by local residents" (55). Small business owners are supposed to be more environmentally responsible, since they have to suffer the externalities along with their neighbours (56). However, unregulated local pollution sources can be a high source of toxins, precisely because they are sited in the community, leading to right-to-know regulations on emissions in localities worldwide (Whate et al.).

58 Small businesses also may not have the funds or desire to implement environmental protection measures. In the United Kingdom, of small businesses voluntarily reporting environmental practices, only 28 percent of those with less than 10 employees reported implementing any environmental protection measures at all, while 77 percent of businesses with 50 - 250 employees implemented measures. The chemicals sector had the highest compliance level, where 70 percent of businesses had regulations in place; however, other metal- and chemical-intensive industries were less compliant.

Just under half of electronics firms had green measures; only 31 percent of metal and 30 percent of textile industries participated. Most small businesses do not have a comprehensive, organization-wide Environmental Management System or plans to introduce one (Environment Agency, 2002: 10). Thus "whether or not a business had an environmental policy depended critically on size. Smaller businesses were least likely to have introduced practical measures to safeguard the environment" (7). As Hahnel suggests, "small, locally-owned businesses do not always oppose pollution and bad development"; since they are "subject to the forces of market competition just as larger businesses are [they] will engage in socially and environmentally destructive behavior whenever their profits are increased by doing so" ("Eco-Localism" 68).

Two applications of pro-market localism demonstrate the limits small businesses face when competing with large ones: the benefits of local circulation and ethical consumption.

How money flows through local spaces

Localism assumes that the lack of distance between economic actors will ensure

59 ethical exchange: "When economic relationships are more personal, they usually become more humane. When we work for, buy from, or invest in people we know, we tend to exercise a greater degree of care and responsibility. Shopkeepers take more time with each customer, craftspeople are more attentive to details" (Shuman 37). The benefits of closer contact extend from distribution to property relations: "Communities with widespread local ownership tend to be more vibrant and stable. Citizens participate more in local affairs. Local owners have a stake in the community. Their children go to local schools" (Morris 437). Civic Economics, a consulting firm in Andersonville, a neighbourhood of Chicago, investigated the impact of local businesses versus chain stores. Interrogating its findings can help establish whether personal connections can resolve the contradiction between use and exchange value.

The survey found that "ten local firms generate a combined $6.7 million in annual economic impact compared to $8.8 million for the ten chains" (Cunningham and Houston

3). However, the disaggregated data shows a net benefit to the local economy: for every

$100 consumers spend at chain stores, $43 stays in the local community, while spending at locally-owned stores retains $68. The "local economic impact" of chain stores equals

$105 per square foot, versus $179 for locally owned stores: small stores pack more value into a smaller space. This comprises a "Local Premium", how much more revenue remains local in locally owned firms versus outsider-owned ones. Local service providers keep 90% more money locally than chains, retailers 63% and restaurants 27% (5).

However, the analysis contains theoretical errors. First, although Andersonville is a definable neighbourhood, it contains localities within it and is itself part of larger

60 localities. As stated in Chapter One, when business owners live in another section of the city from their firms, or large corporations hire workers who live and shop locally, this clouds the definition of where the local community starts and stops, and who is a part of it. This geographic definition is never clarified.9

Second, local merchants must still provide goods: unless those goods are made locally as well, they are imported and the non-local component simply gets displaced from the moment of exchange to the circuit of distribution. Service-based small businesses like massage or web design still need an infrastructure of foreign-made products to facilitate it. Money may circulate locally for a single stage, from consumer to merchant, but must spread afterwards (Albo "Personal Communication").

Third, if goods cost more at a locally-owned firm than a retail giant, then total, net consumption is lower, because higher prices lower the level of goods and services consumed, leaving less money to be spent locally. Likewise, the money saved at the big retail firm is no longer available for local spending. As well, if the local spending remains in rich localities, it does not spread to poor ones (McNally "Personal Communication").

Wages are subject to the same dynamic: unless only local people are hired, money will not stay local. This is nearly impossible for industries that rely on migrant workers, like construction and agriculture (Tufts).

9 This is a problem with other localist analyses. For example, when McKibben states that adding up localist practices can create a workable society, he lauds increased spending on social services in Bhutan, Kerala and Europe as examples (220). This not only mistakes national for local initiatives, it subsumes peripheral economies and global centres of capital accumulation into one, contradictory category called the local. Roberts touts the example of Malawi - which purchased fertilizer to triple yields in 2007, rather than relying on emergency aid - as "local self-reliance and self-rule in food matters... rather than placing authority in institutions and markets far from the scene" (61). This includes the capacity of the Malawian government to create a minor form of ISI, and sell the products on the world market, as local. The criticism of size disappears and a straightforward Keynesianism remains.

61 Four, the figures rely on neoclassical assumptions about the source of value, and this makes determining whether income goes to capital or labour more difficult. "[L]ocal economic impacts for businesses that serve a local market are primarily made up of four components: labor, profit, procurement, and charity" (Cunningham and Houston 4).

Labor becomes a wage cost while profits simply "remain in the city." According to neoclassical economics, these are all equal factors and outcomes of production, and the study assumes all members of a local community derive equal impacts from paying wages, purchasing supplies and earning profits: in other words, they are all entrepreneurs.

Yet according to Marx, labour is the sole source of profit, procurement and charity. This is suggested by the study's own figures: the 70 percent Local Premium of local businesses "are largely accounted for by one factor: labor costs" (6).

The Andersonville study finds that locally owned stores spend 29 percent of their revenue on wages, versus 23 percent for chains. This appears to suggest small businesses

pay higher wages; however, this finding must be interrogated, as the study appears to collapse owner-operators and employers of small firms together. As the study states, local

businesses "are heavily dependent on the labors of the owner... resulting in the most substantial Local Premium." (Cunningham and Houston 9). These results appear elsewhere. In Austin, Texas, local businesses retained 45 cents of every dollar in the city, while the Borders book chain retained 13 cents. The gap was "mostly in the form of wages. Most of the difference came from profits... but the local businesses also spent a higher percentage of revenue on wages, partly because of higher pay rates, and partly

because of less efficient staffing" (Weissman 2004). Small businesses may save on some

62 overhead costs incurred by a national chain, such as advertising and Human Resource costs (Tufts). However, a Local Premium does not necessarily mean better small employers; rather, owner-operators work longer hours and incur higher wage costs because they must replicate other tasks, like accounts, purchasing and stocking that larger organisations have centralized since the nineteenth century. Local businesses pay higher wage rates, not because they provide better deals for consumers or workers, but because consumers pay more for the inefficiencies inherent in small firms: more value is embodied in goods and services produced by small production processes than by larger ones.

Small businesses are also largely exclusive: in 2010 83 percent of American owners were white, married, older men, down from 87 percent in 2000. Shuman hints at their work conditions when he says that many home-based businesses comprise second and third jobs, suggesting workers become entrepreneurs primarily due to stagnant wages. Small businesses are significantly less likely to provide healthcare coverage, a major cost for employees (Shuman 43; Sargeant and Moutray 36).10 American companies with more than 500 employees pay a third higher wages than smaller ones; in Canada, the former pay higher weekly wages than medium and small firms with fewer than 500 and

100 workers respectively (Industry Canada 27). Shuman argues that the difference matters less, because as of 2003 the wage-gap between large and small employers had shrunk by a third, due to the competitive pressures of overseas production and the growth

10 For the U.S., there is no data on disaggregated wage rates for diflferent-sized businesses. Firms with zero to four employees had a collective wage bill of just under $235 billion USD, while firms with over 500 employees paid over $2.8 trillion USD. However, this figure is larger than for all businesses with less than 500 employees, which paid wages of $2.2 trillion USD in the same period, suggesting, at the very least, the dominance of large firms in the U.S. economy (U.S. Small Business Administration 2).

63 of low-wage employers (56). However, the fact that the wages big business pays are shrinking to the meagre, existing level of small ones is not an argument for the latter.

Shuman acknowledges that unionization can be a countermeasure to lower wages, but he hopes for "socially responsible entrepreneurs... who believe that high wages and decent benefits are not just good motivators but also moral imperatives." Thus "labor should embrace small business, unionize it where it can, and encourage worker ownership, participation, and entrepreneurship where it can't" (57). McRobie echoes this sentiment by speaking approvingly of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business as "a powerful advocate of small-scale technology and decentralization", despite the

CFIB's anti-labour sentiments (167).n

Hahnel argues that pro-market localism is simply a form of nostalgia for petty commodity production: not only big firms but "[s]ingle proprietorships, family-owned businesses, and locally owned businesses - where ownership is not 'divorced from personal involvement' - have also been known to pay their employees poorly, provide inadequate benefits, deny their employees control over their work lives, and price gouge their fellow community members" ("Eco-Localism" 68). Despite making the neoclassical mistake of formally assigning labour a value (i.e. a wage) like any other commodity, localism in practice confirms Marx's political economy. Since capitalists are compelled to lower the amount of value each commodity embodies, introducing more labour into the process simply drives costs above the lowest cost, the goal of capitalist production

(Mandel "Marxist" 141). Since local businesses do not have the capital to accomplish

11 See their 2008 report Wage Watch, which argues for lowering public sector wages (Mallett and Wong).

64 these tasks, The Local Premium comes from their substitution of their own bodies and time for capital. This is a strategy for individualized accumulation, but it does not avoid the global law of value, nor does it necessarily create a more humane community.

Subsidies and monopoly capital

Pro-market localists are aware of the power large firms command and suggest government funding could be redirected to supporting small business, treating subsidies as a policy mistake (Petrini 72; Shuman 89; Smith and MacKinnon 230). Shuman acknowledges that economies of scale create inexpensive goods and services, but he blames the success of MNCs on "myriad 'imperfections' in our market economy that uniformly favor" large businesses (45). Wal-Mart is often held up as an example of

"corporate welfare" whose low wages and benefits force workers to use billions of dollars of government income supports in housing and medical care to reproduce their labour (Wal-Mart Watch 4).

It is true that subsidies transfer wealth from individual workers and the state to capitalist enterprise. However, it is telling that hostility to government spending persists among "rentiers and small businessmen - [whose] hatred of the tax collector dominates feelings about the role of government" (Baran and Sweezy 149). For example, the

Canadian Federation of Independent Business's survey on "tax competitiveness" finds a clear majority of its members who feel taxed unfairly and and demand lower taxes and national debt, less "waste" and limited jurisdictions for local governments (CFIB). These

"imperfections" are not simply oversights: rather, subsidies are embedded in inherent dynamics of the capitalist mode of production.

65 First, as Chapter One demonstrated, centralization turns competitive into monopoly capital, as the capitalist division of labour compels the creation of ever-larger units of ownership. As part of this process, "monopoly capital socializes more and more capital costs and social expenses of production", despite profits remaining private

(O'Connor 40). This is because private "capital cannot produce solely through the actions of the many [private and competitive] capitals units the necessary social nature of its existence." The state comes into existence to guarantee the rights of property holders as a class and to fulfill the social requirements that private capital will not. To do so, the state must progressively regulate, support or run production in sectors where profit falls, and subsidies become a means to offset capital's inherent tendencies towards crisis (Altvater).

They can also absorb surplus capital and use it to stimulate demand (Baran and Sweezy

147). The socialization of military, infrastructure and welfare costs follow (O'Connor

41).

There is a political rationale to subsidies as well. Capitalism's destruction of previously existing forms of non-market reproduction compels more and more people to rely on the market or state for subsistence, leading to political support for subsidies. The political weight of capital extends throughout the state apparatus (Baran and Sweezy

157). Vested interests have always influenced government at all levels in capitalist society and will oppose even successful, socially rational developments that might threaten their power (166). It follows that direct subsidies to corporations with oligarchic power are jealously guarded. "In all such cases, since private interests wield political power, the limits of government spending are narrowly set and have nothing to do with

66 social needs - no matter how shamefully obvious" (168). Even if it were politically feasible to end subsidies to large firms, growth of the productive forces is a consequence of the capital relation, not a determinant: simply opposing the former does not eliminate the latter. As Baran and Sweezy discuss in reference to military spending, the political power that accrues to monopoly capital limits the ability of a social use-value to substitute for an anti-social one (155). In fact, monopolies cannot be broken up permanently "without the abolition of the capitalist relations of production" (Mandel

"Late Capitalism" 521, Note 62). Capital's power is enmeshed in the contradictory laws of accumulation it must respond to. Subsidies appear further up the chain of causality but are outcomes of these fundamental tendencies.

Doing away with the middleman

Just as localists see subsidies as voluntary, they also suggest distribution agents can be replaced or removed from systems of production. McKibben suggests that being a local farmer "makes economic sense: without any middlemen, he gets all the value from his crop, and so, even on a small farm, he and his wife are able to support their family"

(48). This argument is replicated in the local farmers' market movement (Kingsolver 76).

It is true that niche markets can be created on a small scale; however, the capitalist mode of production depends upon large-scale distribution networks, due to the division of labour. In pre-capitalist society, all agricultural production happened in the same place.

"The separation of agriculture and handicrafts leads ultimately to the insertion of independent trade between the two." As commodity production specializes, "the more do these intermediate functions have to be systematized and rationalized" (Mandel "Late

67 Capitalism" 384). The role of the "middlemen" is actually a crucial method of distribution under current social relations of production, wholly tied into the rationalization of large-scale production. Attempts to replace these networks face stiff competition from the larger, more established distribution networks that small producers must copy. For example, local and organic food producers in Southern Ontario have begun relying on 100 Mile Market Inc. to distribute their products to Toronto-based local-food restaurants and grocery stores (Lewington). However, these distribution

1 "J measures are subject to the same market-place rules as regular networks.

Technical limitations of consumer choice

Since localism believes consumer preference drives capitalist growth, it follows that consumers can fundamentally alter capitalism by changing what they buy. Petrini suggests that "the time has come for everybody - producers, traders, institutions, associations, and individual citizens - to ask themselves whether their lifestyle is sustainable and to take steps to make sustainability measurable and testable" (116).

Individual preference creates systemic change: "I don't foresee a coordinated change in our economies, but a gradual one, faster in some places than in others, pulled by personal

12 Fair Trade (FT) networks demonstrate the limits of alternative distribution. In their more sober moments, FT advocates recognize that structural barriers are built into the marketplace. But the answer is more market participation: the "coffee crisis gives new urgency to efforts to promote the alternative—Fair Trade... [which] corrects market imbalances by guaranteeing a minimum price for small farmers' harvests." It is never stated how FT can protect commodities exposed to global price competition. As of 2005, 550,000 coffee farmers had a FT agreement, 2.75 percent of the total 20 million (Global Exchange). This may be an upper limit, since the niche market for FT coffee is already becoming saturated in the US (Farnworth & Goodman 13). The solution operates at an entirely different scale than the problem, and like local food growers, FT advocates have found themselves drawn into setting up alternative distribution networks that must compete with capitalist distributors on the latter's terms (Transfair USA). Those networks have little or no impact on global commodity prices, as the 40 year slump in coffee prices demonstrates, itself a product of overproduction of coffee, not a lack of market awareness of ethical alternatives (Hal lam).

68 desire and pushed by environmental necessity" (McKibben 106). The best way to change our "big choices" is to make numerous small ones (Petrini 124). Kingsolver exhorts

Americans to eat locally and organically-produced meat, while the growth of organic and local garden sellers "suggests] that consumers are capable of defying a behemoth industry and embracing change" (179). Shuman names 10 different areas consumers could change their spending habits to buy locally (106). The power of consumers can change not only their own habits but also entire industries: "industry will not, but individual market growers can communicate concern that they're growing food in a way that's healthy and safe... They can educate consumers about a supply chain that's as healthy or unhealthy as we choose to make it" (Kingsolver 116). Shuman says his version of localism is "about consumers shopping carefully, weighing quality as well as price, being more attentive to the expense of travel and time, and accounting wisely for the costs to their community exacted by nonlocal purchases." He goes on to advocate using competitive local banks, investing in local businesses, using new technology to compete against global businesses and ending subsidies. This visions results in "everyone in the community coming together to envision a better economic future for all of its members, including the poor, the elderly, the infirm, and the young" (211). The implications are sweeping and global.

However, localists cannot ignore the structural constraints that make local production costlier and inefficient. McKibben admits a large city like New York could not be fed by the limited output of local farms (50). Processing grain can be done "more efficiently on a vast scale... [and] such scale quickly undercuts] local markets." (51).

69 Industrial farming generates seven times as much output with a third of the labour force compared to farming 100 years ago (Smith and MacKinnon 57). Local food costs more because of a lack of subsidies, fewer externalities and the extra costs involved in alternative distribution (Hopp qtd. in Kingsolver 117), and Estill acknowledges that the quality of local production and distribution is not consistent (102). These dynamics meant his small-town, local-food cooperative could not compete with a large chain store and struggled financially: "tweaks continued. Everybody pulled. Customers forgave bugs in the system. Some investors forgave their interest payments. Suppliers modified their systems" (101). As Kingsolver argues, "markets and infrastructure depend on consumers who will at least occasionally choose locally grown foods, and pay more than rock- bottom prices" (75).

While acknowledging that capitalist economies of scale produce more efficiently, localists suggest individuals can compensate by not only shopping locally but producing locally as well. Kingsolver bought a farm and grew her own fruit, vegetables and livestock. The experiment provided cheaper food than could be bought in the store and generated a small income as a demonstration project: "our goal had not really been to economize, only to exercise some control over which economy we would support" (307).

The idea that individual consumers and producers have the freedom to choose their economy betrays this experiment's Proudhonian basis in artisanal production. If voluntarily reducing one's income by spending more on food is not a strategy most workers are willing to adopt, then sacrificing one's job and free time to avoid

"environmental and health damage" appears even more unlikely.

70 The limits of ethical consumption apply to other endeavours as well. In response to suburban sprawl, Estill tried to create a community on the basis of private property rights, or "covenants", enforced by a homeowner's board that mediates disputes (120).

The initial goal was to create a community sharing similar values. However, the success of the project attracted survivalists who created property disputes. "Neighbors fought with neighbors, the covenants drew fierce scrutiny, and the community never really emerged as a community at all" (126). Moreover, since it could not muster enough capital, the community was powerless to stop a developer buying the entire county. The experience demonstrated first that individual consumers, making informed market choices, create separate, opposed choices, and second that smaller units of capital have difficulty competing with big capital to control how resources are used.

Even in the most Utopian schemes, the mechanism for sustainability is consumer choice. For Petrini's Slow Food movement, farmers must provide information about production and distribution, while consumers must seek out information and "set up new food communities" (169). Food consumers can form a world network from different cultures and productive communities (205). The network creates a market in the

"exchange of abilities" i.e. the direct exchange of concrete labours with its own "nodes and communities" of distribution (232). Consumers will destroy the centralization of capital through their own economic initiative. They will not need to confront the power of agribusiness: "rather, it is a question of... awareness of the limitations with which [the system] is confronted and introducing the new concept of sustainable quality as an essential prerequisite" (228). Capitalism can be recreated on a smaller, parallel scale with

71 no contradictions.

Those contradictions become apparent in one of the most popular localist consumer choice schemes, the Hundred Mile Diet. Smith and MacKinnon decided to consume only food originating within the local watershed, which existed within approximately 100 miles of them. Yet to come up with a single local meal, they had to visit numerous grocery stores, sourcing every ingredient and paying $128.87 (16). To save money they switched to growing their own food. Even staples like rice, salt and wheat grain could not be purchased and they ate potatoes for most meals (35). Every addition to their diet, such as fish and poultry, took similar calculations that they conducted as individual consumers (74). To maintain vegetable consumption they began canning their own produce, while apartment closet space was set aside for vegetable storage (153,178). In another example, after a week spent figuring out the origin of

Thanksgiving dinner, Estill could not determine a way to determine food miles for all 34 ingredients (107). The diets illustrate limit of ethical consumption: at each stage, the activists ended up reproducing the division of labour in miniature, spending long hours finding food or growing their own.

Ethical consumption runs afoul of the complexity of trying to change an economy through shifting use-values. For example, in a bid to reduce greenhouse gases, localists trace a major source of the carbon footprint through transport, and a 2001 study states that shipping food nationally uses 17 times more fuel than regional shipping. More recent research suggests food travels 2500 miles on average before purchase (Smith and

MacKinnon 30). Therefore localists advocate for reduced food miles. However,

72 according to a British government survey, certain foodstuffs are more carbon-intensive when grown in industrialized countries, as their colder climate means more carbon is used for storage. Spanish tomato farmers produce less carbon dioxide than British farmers, while Kenyan rose producers emit less carbon dioxide than the Dutch (Bedard).

Transportation is only one factor in overall energy use and efficient handling and storage can outweigh its impact. Even Smith and MacKinnon cite another study that showed it was more efficient, carbon-wise, to import sheep from New Zealand than to grow them in

Britain. It would take a wholesale shift to organic production in the U.K. to reduce environmental externalities by 75 percent (222). A recent three year study of salmon production found that buying imported frozen fish uses less carbon than fresh local fish, because container and rail shipping are extremely efficient ways of transporting produce

(Pelletier et al.). Food production as a whole creates 83 percent of carbon emissions, transportation only 11 percent (Weber and Matthews). Those costs are external to the consumer. Food miles do not accurately reflect how the constantly changing technology of production and transportation affect prices and the environment.

Not only are individual consumers unable to assimilate the information necessary to create ethical shopping choices, those choices themselves are contradictory. Some localists acknowledge that there is too much information for consumers to incorporate, leading some to stop consuming ethically. "But one must not give in; one must reconsider and redefine the role of the consumer" (Petrini 165). Yet, in an advanced capitalist economy with a massive number of interrelated production and distribution networks, it is impossible even for economists to create models that account for the supply and

73 demand of goods and services. The result is a "thousand simultaneous equations with a thousand unknowns [that] is hard to come into mental contact with. It does show that everything depends on everything else, which is interesting and usefully humbling, but it is also crippling... to face the implication that in order to predict anything, you have first to know everything" (Daly and Farley 277). Buried in what seems like a technical limitation, Daly and Farley are, in fact, referring to the anarchy of the capitalist marketplace, the very reason abstract labour exists. A democratically planned economy would be the only way to eliminate the market anarchy of "a thousand simultaneous equations." But rather than proceed to socialism, consumers are supposed to refuse to

"give in" and cope individually with the crises of allocation endemic to the capitalist marketplace. Yet they have even fewer resources to make detailed calculations of every act of consumption than economists. A commodity's life cycle is incredibly complex and hidden; even if its ecological impact is evident, there may not other alternatives available

(Albritton 167). Defining change through consumer choice sets the market as the outer limits of possible change: "the honey-trap of ethical consumerism is to think that the only means of communication we have with producers is through the market, and that the only way we can take collective action is to persuade everyone else to shop like us" (Patel

312). This is not simply misguided but a concession to neoclassical assumptions about consumer preferences, which allows capital to shift responsibility for its action to the individual consumer (Albritton 180).

As Chapter One showed, the circuit of consumption is not autonomous: "the use of products is determined by the social conditions in which the consumers find

74 themselves placed, and these conditions themselves are based on class antagonisms."

Those antagonisms dictate that consumers buy what is produced for them on a mass scale: cheap things are widespread because they are profitable, not because they are useful, in terms of providing nutrition or health. "In a society founded on poverty the poorest products have the fatal prerogative of being used by the greatest number" (Marx

"Poverty" 54). Exchange, not use-value, governs production, even when the products made are unhealthy.

These limitations suggest that the market is not a neutral tool to distribute goods, but a space where capital asserts its power to drive down the value of labour power and obtain more surplus value. Localism that attempts to use the market must confront this dynamic, and its own assessment of local businesses and small-scale production suggests there are strict, outer limits on the ability to change centralization through smaller enterprise or ethical consumption.

Anti-market localism

These limitations suggest the need to overcome the market in order to create socially useful production. There is no clear divide between pro- and anti-market localists: for example, Schumacher was not opposed to socialism (220), and Naess, the originator of deep ecology, called for an alliance between socialists and environmentalists to create radical equality and "fight the excesses of the unrestrained market economy"

(192). However, both theorists naturalized capitalist social relations, whereas anti-market variants of localism have developed a more complex relationship between the political and economic realms, calling for economic decentralization and autonomous,

75 community-controlled democracy (Carrlson 77; Hahnel "Economic" 181). Libertarian

Municipalism (LM) views size as a product of centralized political power. Upon decentralization, urban politics could shift from city hall to neighbourhoods, creating new, community-focused infrastructure, local production and local gardens. The vast social organization of capital and the nation-state would disappear, including the split between rural and urban (Biehl and Bookchin 95). Bioregionalism involves simplifying lifestyles and habitats to suit a local level. Advocates study the land to understand its ecological limits, learning the history of earlier cultures and planning community-self- reliance. Local communities become the basis for sustainable social organization, reducing growth, energy use, commodities and population to a "roughly constant and balanced level" (Sale 480).

However, although anti-market localism develops a strong criticism of the negative effects of capitalist development in a number of areas, it ultimately fails to account for its causes. This means that its plans to build autonomous, local economies, develop simple technologies and create alternative credit relations are limited by the inherent tendencies of capital to grow and centralize, as it tries to overcome technical problems of production.

Local Autonomy and an end to inter-local trade

Radical forms of localism suggest that communities can de-link from international economies to respond better to local needs (Norberg-Hodge 405; Berry 414; Morris 438).

It is certainly true that some products can be made locally with fewer resources: for instance, in temperate climates, certain agricultural products can be grown closer to

76 distribution and consumption networks. However, localism assumes the entirety of social production can be reproduced locally. Marx called this the Robinson Crusoe theory of history: ignoring how the objects Crusoe used to survive alone were the product of a widespread social division of labour ("Capital Volume One" 170). Biehl and Bookchin argue that, from the Neolithic era onwards, individual communities have never been self- sufficient economically, and farmers and artisans have relied on outside resources for tools and raw materials (97). This analysis is borne out by theorizing production as a series of chains, stringing together labour and productive processes to create, transport and market commodities. Chains coordinate raw material location and extraction across different spaces, confronting numerous, extra-local "technological, geopolitical, environmental, and market conditions." These dynamics have been traced back thousands of years: production has never been entirely local (Ciccantell and Smith 367,363).

Of course, economies of scale create new problems. It is cheaper to produce on a larger scale, yet this expansion raises the costs of raw materials due to the technology involved and higher land rents surrounding new infrastructure. To compensate for these costs, producers try to reduce inputs and make output units more transportable, creating even larger economies of scale, "exacerbating over the long term the very contradiction between scale and space that they are designed to solve" (369). Moreover, production and transport can often require environmentally damaging infrastructure and intensive fuel use, the 2010 oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico being one of the latest examples.

Small-scale production can solve some of these problems, but it creates others. A hypothetical local wind power generator would need a steel industry; otherwise its

77 windmills and parts would have to be built elsewhere, requiring the production of exports to facilitate trade. Shuman admits that "[t]his process of substitution never ends" (54). If local jurisdictions filled production chains for every industry, it would create wasteful duplication. If other localities could make those products more efficiently, they could export those goods, but then firms would move to the lowest-cost locations. Without a mechanism to distribute production between communities, in the absence of social planning, exclusively local production would "lead to the usual litany of inequities, instabilities and inefficiencies that advocates of community-based economics (correctly) criticize in capitalism and market socialism" (Hahnel "Economic" 183).

These problems are not just economic but political: bioregionalism, in particular, fails to account for the complexities of human development. In a designated self- sufficient region, coordination problems remain: where people live and who gets to live there, how land gets redistributed and according to which authority, and how those within a bioregion establish a communal governing structure in the presence of capitalist social and property relations. Even regions rejecting autarky would need extra-local infrastructure outside of the bounds of any one authority as well as governing mechanisms for resource conflicts (Kovel 194). Why this would turn out any differently than in recent human history, dripping with blood and dirt as Marx puts it, is never answered ("Capital Volume One" 926).

It is left to market-oriented localists to articulate these interdependencies. Shuman is aware of some of the contradictions of de-linking, warning that locally-produced goods may not find local consumers (50). His solution is Import Substitution Industrialization

78 (ISI), in which new facilities are created to produce goods locally, which can then be sold to other communities. The sudden shifts in global commodity prices would be avoided by not producing for export. This "would enable tens of thousands of communities worldwide to stop wasting precious earnings from exports on imports they could just as easily produce for themselves" (51).

ISI has been tried before, as states in the Global South attempted to implement alternative trade arrangements themselves in the post Second World War era. Under ISI, countries attempted to develop their own industrial base, creating finished manufacturing goods that could be used at home, rather than importing them using expensive foreign currency, financing by selling primary resource products (Saad-Filho "Pro-Poor" 12).

However, ISI rested on the ability of countries to protect their home markets through tariffs. These had to be removed when International Financial Institutions such as the

World Bank and International Monetary Fund created structural adjustment programs, which provided aid only if indebted nations removed those tariffs and subsidies (Barratt

Brown 106). Even successful substitutionists still faced a huge technological gap between their own level of development and that of the imperialist countries, upon whom they depended for expertise and supplies (114). When states tried to tax transnational and put the proceeds towards national development, companies could either close down and move or engage in transfer pricing, shifting profit-reporting to a lower-taxed subsidiary somewhere else (127). Moreover, local elites often resisted the wealth and property redistribution necessary to promote effective diversification (Fridell 53).

Surprisingly, ISI encounters more problems in advanced capitalist economies that,

79 unlike poorer states, do not have the benefit of importing already-existing templates and must establish new production processes and distribution chains (Hirschman 7).

Sufficient capital exists for nationalization of existing industries or setting up new ones, but this poses political questions of how to establish democratic control over public finance (Panitch and Gindin "Eight Theses"). Even setting up national industries, to say nothing of local ones, would require the socialization of finance and the restriction of private property rights. In other words, creating local production policy is not a technical question of appropriate size, but a social question of capital's power to dictate what gets made and how.

Problems of advanced technology

As shown, large-scale ownership is compatible with technologically advanced, small-scale production. However, localist literature often conflates the size of industry with the technology it uses. This confusion means localists do not understand how technology develops from capital's need to overcome technical obstacles to growth, and leads localists to overemphasize the benefits of simple technologies.

Localists recognize that unrestrained growth creates an unsustainable social and ecological impact (McKibben 31). This is usually subsumed into a criticism of industrial society in general, beginning with a sense that everyday life under capitalism is commodified. Schumacher blames "crudest materialism" for reducing nature to "a quarry for exploitation''' (89). This approaches Marx's understanding of externalities: if an item from the natural world has no exchange value, it has no value at all. Under capitalism the appropriation of natural wealth takes the form of private property, the unfettered right to

80 a particular piece of land or resource. This process has a history in the ongoing enclosure of common land and the dispossession of existing small-holders (Albritton 21). In other words, the use-value of the natural world cannot be considered apart from the need to generate exchange value, which defines capitalist history.

Schumacher recognizes that industry moves towards centralization, specialization and "any kind of material waste that promises to save labour. As a result, the wider human habitat, far from being humanised and ennobled by man's agricultural activities, becomes standardised to dreariness or even degraded to ugliness" (92). Yet for him, capitalist degradation does not stem from the social compulsion of seeking SNALT, but from technology, the machines that create industrialism: "whether a given industrial activity is appropriate to the conditions of a developing district does not directly depend on 'scale', but on the technology employed" (146). He goes to great lengths to describe the difference between tools and machines: the latter are direct extensions of a

"craftsman's fingers", enhancing "a man's skill and power" while the former "turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave" (39). Poverty is caused by expensive technology that eliminates the "traditional workplaces" of poor people without replacing them (149).

In response, the permaculture movement promotes "appropriate" technologies that are simple enough for local people to use and maintain them (Carrlson 60).

Marx was acutely conscious of the degradations of large-scale industry, devoting over 100 pages of Capital Volume One to machine technology's impact on workers (517-

639). However, he prefaced this discussion with the social context of technology.

Anticipating Schumacher's distinction between tool and machine, Marx points out that

81 machines made for hand-operation are often run by external sources of power and vice versa (493). What defines a machine is its ability to replace human workers, not the manner in which it operates (495). This, in turn, arises from the purpose of productive technology: "machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus value" (492). Marx goes on to show how machinery creates the need for large-scale industry to produce the means of production (505). However, the social purpose of technology is apparent from the beginning: to drive down the value embodied in commodities.

To show the benefits of new, small technology, Shuman speaks approvingly of agile manufacturing, in which small quantities of goods are specially produced for particular orders. He believes Toyota's adoption of the technology is simply a large-scale example of what small producers could emulate (71). However, this not only conflates the size of production with the size of ownership, it points to the contradiction of trying to improve technology while SNALT remains the objective. Agile production has long been recognized by labour activists as a means to increase relative surplus value by encouraging precarious employment and speeding up production (Wells 1). The imperative to profit drives technological use, not its social or ecological benefits (Albo

"Limits" 12). For example, tools to ameliorate environmental damage only exist because markets for the realization of value exist in those technologies. Even climate change, the product of unrestrained capitalist growth, has become a growth industry for research and

82 development firms (Grueber and Studt 23).

Sophisticated productive technology displaces the poor from their workplaces because machines can replace human labour. The poor cannot use different tools to

"work themselves out of poverty", because capital controls large-scale industrial processes. Expensive technology is more productive and efficient from the point of view of capital.

Potential of advanced technology

Machines cannot be separated from the social relations they embody and serve, and blaming technology for the social degradations of capitalism only "serves to veil the specific social relations that privilege exploiters over the exploited and hierarchs over their subordinates" (Bookchin 34). For example, it was the lack of appropriate machinery to harvest cotton, and not advanced technology, that caused slavery, as slaves were cheaper to use than machines. Marx details the requirements of machine production that led to demand for more raw materials and the expansion of colonialism ("Capital Volume

One" 571). However, the brutal conquest of colonial power and resource exploitation were accomplished without the use of advanced machines (Bookchin 35).

Marx did not have a fetish of technological rationality: since capitalism formed by excluding people from the land through enclosure and dispossession, he felt that socialism had to accept the natural limits that land conservation places on production, which meant not simply the end of labour exploitation but the end of alienation from the land (Foster 177). Marx's socialism therefore involved creating green space in cities, industries in the countryside and ending large metropolises (175). The parallels between

83 this and Schumacher's critique are clear; however, Marx also saw some ecological advantages to economies of scale. Although he agreed with present-day localists that small farmers treated land more gently than large ones, he believed rational, non­ destructive agriculture could be widespread and large-scale where conditions for sustainability existed. Although Marx decried the "colossal wastage in capitalist production," he also suggested that effective re-use of products required large-scale processes, using advanced machinery to process waste ("Capital Volume Three" 195-

196). Smaller technologies, industries and firms develop in a complex, political interaction with larger ones. Capitalism does not advance inexorably forward, progressing through stages of history and building bigger and bigger machines, but rather develops different forms in different spaces. Determining how technology could be put to social uses in local spaces is always a matter of studying concrete conditions, not a principle.

This means that in some cases, local, 'appropriate' technology may be unethical, denying the benefits of growth to societies that need it. Growth has the potential to generate use-values necessary to address the contradictions of uneven development, creating jobs and aggregate demand, making more goods, services and jobs available.

(Saad-Filho "Pro-Poor" 7). Capitalist development creates inequality, but with social planning, growth could be "appropriately targeted" towards those who are structurally excluded from the economy, both by increasing output and choosing less destructive production priorities. Controlled democratically, economic growth has the potential to be freeing.

84 For example, McRobie claims that a production focus on people, and not commodities, would lead to technologies to help poor women (186). Yet labour-saving devices like laundry machines have the potential to free women from some of that labour.

Consumer devices, let alone mass public transit systems and high-speed internet, are impossible without a highly-developed capacity to source materials, process them into finished products and distribute them across large distances. The link between appropriate and small technologies is not automatic. There are good examples of technology that can be put to use immediately by poor people with no other resources than animals and their own physical strength (194). However, this would be a foolish proposition in places with an advanced division of labour. It is worth stating clearly that large-scale, high technology production has the potential to contribute to emancipation, freeing time by automating tasks, eliminating unpleasant work and creating a comfortable, secure, ecologically rational existence for all (Biehl and Bookchin 98).

This is not to deny the massive environmental impact of high-tech production in its present form: for example, the toxicity of electronics production and disposal is well- documented (Yu et al. 3232). It is clear that capitalism promotes wasteful individual consumption, much of which only provides temporary benefit for a few while creating ecological misery for many. However, collective consumption is actually too low. Many of the world's poor, who do not get their basic needs met, should consume more. This would only be possible a rationally-planned economy that can change the structures of consumption according to democratic need, providing communal goods such as health care, housing and transport (McNally "Personal Communication"). Some technologies

85 with collective applications must be mass-produced if their benefits are to be widespread.

Moreover, if the localists wish to accomplish the direct democracy that small community production will supposedly entail, technology will be necessary to reduce workload, as those too busy reproducing themselves cannot "fully participate as citizens in political life" (Biehl and Bookchin 98).

Local, appropriate technology does not always promote the ethical, ecological, steady-state society localism wishes to enact. Its premises may be useful according to precise, local conditions that must be studied in their concrete forms. However, assessing technology is always a social question.

Work as freedom

The historical dispossession of the working class, and the necessity of wage labour, disappears as localists suggest work can be liberating. Carrlson derides the

Marxist notion of workers' self-emancipation, suggesting instead that workers unite around "the embrace of meaningful, freely-chosen, and 'free' work on the other" (16).

This echoes neoclassical economics, which, rather than investigating how the social appropriation of wealth takes place, focused instead on how individual preferences shape the market.

This confuses labour and work. For Marx, work was creative activity inherent to all human capacity, while labour was the work performed specifically under conditions of capitalist exploitation ("Capital Volume One" 1056). Schumacher agrees that capitalist economics deals with the quantity of output, not the quality of work, but he does not clarify what work is, relying once again on defining a use-based physical process, rather

86 than a social relation. He follows Ricardo in stating that "there is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour" but confuses capitalist labour and productive activity in general: "the modern economist has been brought up to consider

'labour' or work as little more than a necessary evil" (38). Those two are not

synonymous, yet Schumacher refuses to differentiate them, stating that "character... is

formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of

human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it... [and] equally their products." All

work can be liberating, such that unemployment is not just a loss of income but a loss of

the "nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work" (39).

If work and labour are equally sources of emancipation, then localists can find

ways to evade the wage relation. Kingsolver suggests doing away with money altogether,

working "directly for food" (176). Estill advocates volunteer labour: "sustainable

agriculture as it is currently practiced is excruciatingly labor intensive, and... 'interns'

who are on the sustainable farm circuit to learn the trade often provide labor." Yet "farm

interns [are] enjoying a high quality of life despite their low standard of living, and as an

eater I enjoy the fruits of their labors" (112). The wage-relation disappears from history,

replaced by the ethical impulses of workers who apparently do not need a salary. This is

essentially a call for employment on the basis of use-value: "while the materialist is

mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. It is not wealth

that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of

pleasurable things but the craving for them" (Schumacher 40). While "liberation" is an

admirable goal, there is no way to reproduce one's labour power in a capitalist system

87 without an "attachment to wealth": namely, a portion of the value the worker has produced, received in the form of wages.

LETS, alternative currency schemes and credit

Estill's realization that "[w]e value capital more highly than people", and

Schumacher's admission that profit is the only determinant of worth, shows a common- sense understanding of money's centrality to capitalist social life (62; Schumacher 28).

Anti-market localism suggests that substituting different kinds of monies can overcome this form of degradation. This search for money alternatives is articulated in three ways:

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) systems, which match goods and service providers; local currencies, where an alternative store of value circulates in local spaces, rather than being tied to specific, pre-determined concrete labours; and new forms of credit to support local enterprise (Ingham 185).

Estill models a small, local economy when he describes exchange between artisans in his town, all of whom are on a first-name basis (33). This creates a positive circle: "Whether it's the studio artist, the lettuce grower, the wood man, the yoga instructor, or the network monitoring guru, at the heart of a vibrant economy is a meaningful living for one" (58). This is the LETS principle: instead of trading goods or services directly, participants trade IOUs with a promise to provide those goods and services. Having asserted that money represented concrete labour time, Proudhon proposed elaborate schemes for different currencies and labour-exchange banks. With finance suitably regulated, products could exchange for like products, and no one could hoard money or speculate ("Property Is Theft!" 587). LETS are often adopted

88 successfully at first: for example, Meeker-Lowry cites an American example in which local restaurants issued their own scrip when banks refused to finance them, essentially making their customers their guarantors (452).

However, market values still dictate LETS values: when local scrips become exchangeable with regular money, participants with higher-value, scarcer skills do better, while poor people have to do more labour-intensive tasks. In one example, a scrip representing labour-hours was equivalent to $10 U.S.: "lawyers charge five Hours per hour, and babysitters half an Hour per hour" (Ingham 187). Meeker-Lowry asks those who "want to move away from the conventional value system... should one person's labor be worth three or four times what someone else earns?" (451). This is almost a direct paraphrase of Marx's criticism of Proudhon, providing an implicit recognition that, in capitalism, actual labour expended on actual things does not count towards the production or measurement of value. Since LETS do not represent abstract value, prices are more likely to vary widely, depending on how much the person providing the service values her own labour. The subjective quality of LETS make them more likely to be restricted to small groups of committed activists with the resources to participants, and in practice, they abandon LETS once "the economy turns around." In Proudhon's case, the labour bank could not supply enough goods when members needed them (McNally

"Against" 137). When the model falters, "members must make a commitment to [LETS] in both good times and bad. Without this commitment, LETS's real potential to contribute to systemic change (rather than just creating more purchasing power) is undermined" (Meeker-Lowry 451). Calling on "the values and consciousness of its

89 members" to save LETS schemes (458) means they end up limited to small, isolated cases (Shuman 111; Hahnel 343).

To solve this problem, a local currency creates what is essentially a broader form of LETS. Local currencies introduce a time lag: participants can store what they have to trade until another user needs it. According to their proponents, local currencies will keep that stored value in the community. McKibben suggests that since the end of the gold standard, "value rests merely on the shared confidence of its users in the system that produces it.... Which means, theoretically, that since the value of money is based on trust, there should be room for plenty of currencies to exist side by side" (163). Monbiot suggests alternative currencies can provide a means of circulation during capital flight

("State").

However, local currencies do not provide the necessary technical and social functions that money fulfils in a capitalist economy. To reiterate, actual labour expended on actual things does not count towards the production or measurement of value.

Standard measures of value could, in theory, eliminate misallocation between the supply and demand of goods and services. But "all those who wish to discover some standard of value in effect want to transform capitalism into a system capable of conscious planning."

It is not: capitalist "relations [are] mediated through things", making money a measure of value because "production relations are not, and cannot be, planned in advance." Strict measures of concrete labours are impossible, and "those who think there can be some invariable measure of value in fact completely misunderstand the nature of capital"

(Pilling Chapter Five). Capitalism's inherent irrationality, its inability to plan what is

90 produced and how it is distributed according to social need, makes money necessary. As long as acts of production are planned privately and separately, money is the abstract medium that can represent those acts.

Money also represents what Ingham calls a "promise to pay": all contracting parties must believe that their commitments to exchange will be realized. However, to claim as Estill does that, "trade is a function of trust, and it is trusting one another that lies at the heart of our local economy" misses the coercive, structural imperative that money represents (175). Capital trusts states to enforce the right to accumulate and to provide stable property rights for credit-issuing institutions. When Afghan warlords issue their own currency, they can better enforce the promise to pay than the national state

(Ingham 184). Money represents the social and political aspects of capitalist power.

This means that LETS and local currencies can work in small locales with enough dedicated participants, but they cannot be generalized. Examining local currencies in

1920s Germany, Monbiot blames central banks for bringing all these schemes to a halt out of a fear of losing their monopoly on currency ("State"). However, the banks were simply fulfilling their role in guaranteeing the credit quality of national currency; since the end of the U.S. Gold Standard in 1971, central banks have had to guarantee that quality on international money markets (Harvey "Limits" 249). Even those banks that do accept local currencies do not pay interest on them, for fear of paying more than market- based rates. This restricts local currencies to assisting exchange, not generating new credit and expanding production (Ingham 187).

Money is not exclusively capitalist: in pre-capitalist economies, it forms only one

91 of many other links mediating exchange. For example, feudal peasants traded some goods or equivalent labours directly, while other goods were made for the market and exchanged using currency. However, one of the tasks capitalism accomplished was to dispossess the mass of labourers from the means of production. Reproduction became mediated by the market and money became the dominant means of exchange. Non- market exchange continues to exist: some forms of it, such as unpaid domestic work, provide a source of free value for capital. However, generalized commodity production needs money to work: without it, this would imply capitalist social relations have not been generalized.

Credit is money advanced by financial institutions for capital to invest in new productive facilities, on the expectation that it will create enough new surplus value to generate interest. Petrini argues that the problem with capital is that it does not invest in social justice and calls for investment policy to be guided by use-values: "[w]e need a slower, more 'patient' investment policy, which operates outside the classical framework of finance: sustainable models of investment for the agricultural communities, which give them time to grow without expecting immediate profits" (139). Estill suggests that credit is a neutral tool that local banks can issue to encourage ethical, small-scale production

(174). For a seven percent return, he buys a local artisan's credit card debt on the expectation that her work would sell. Next he finds a locally-owned bank to deposit money, which had local decision makers who would manage his money based on his reputation (162). With a local bank, "all we need to do is fill it up with our deposits, and borrow those deposits for our ventures" (163). This gives local banks the opportunity to

92 issue local currency; with bank support, "[m]ore users would sign on, and more firms would accept the currency as tender", creating a virtuous circle (174). Non-usurious rates can be bolstered by the trust and shared values at the heart of the local community.

However, changing the form of credit does not change how capital uses it. Like money, credit also predates capitalist economies: for example, peasants remained indebted to their feudal masters who had advanced them credit, while sharecroppers were indebted to landowners. However, once money became a connecting link for all socio­ economic activity in capitalism, capitalists gained access to new forms of credit to create new means of production. Credit did not create capitalism, but it has become a major tool that capital uses to expand. Personal relations between creditors and capitalists can work in an undeveloped market, but in a complex one, that relationship is institutionalized within the bank (Harvey "Limits" 247). As seekers of interest, banks have little incentive to set their own exchange policy independent of going rates. Rather, they face pressure to issue credit to finance future production on the expectation that it will generate surplus value and pay interest, not help the community. As Luxemburg observes, as "far as he

[the capitalist] is concerned, credit is only a means of 'adapting' his insufficient productive forces to the needs of the market" ("Reform" 92). She argues against those who would make credit a "mechanical means of adaptation existing outside of the process of exchange": credit is, in fact, "a higher natural stage of the process of exchange and, therefore, as tied to all the contradictions inherent in capitalist exchange... an organic link of capitalist economy at a certain stage of its development" (91). Attracting capital through deregulating markets is a defining feature of neoliberalism, and the importance

93 of global, deregulated credit to capital is best shown by its absence. In the financial crisis that began in 2008, banks stopped lending to each other, afraid of being burdened with bad debt. To prevent the credit system from failing, states used vast reserves of public money to allow banks to write off toxic debt and renew credit relationships.

State- or cooperatively-regulated banks have, historically, provided access to credit in national moneys, providing lower interest rates and more readily available loans.

Democratizing finance remains a viable goal for social movements, forcing states to set the terms for socially useful lending, such as creating interest-free housing loans. But more radical measures to bypass abstract labour will fail as long as the drive to achieve

SNALT remains. For labour-money to work, supply and demand would have to be guaranteed, so that individual and social average labour times are the same. The mechanism governing exchange would have to control all sales and purchases. Labour power could not be sold; rather, wage changes would change price ratios. Both production and consumption would have to be guaranteed from the outset, which means socialized production. Commodity exchange, and the separation of producers from means of production, would be eliminated (McNally "Against" 158).

By not recognizing how the drive to achieve SNALT drives capitalist growth, anti-market localism propose individualized solutions to capital centralization. Small- scale technologies are not always appropriate to meet social need. Free labour remains limited by the compulsion to lower the value of commodities. LETS, alternative currency and credit schemes do not overcome the structural imperative to determine the value of abstract labour in the global market.

94 Regressive localisms

Trapped in a use-value model, some localists simply propose the opposite of the concentration they see. For example, Schumacher calls for agriculture to "be deindustrialized; the earth and the natural environment must be given priority again"

(Schumacher 118). Building complexity and scientific rigour into the production of commodities could provide new use-values and fewer externalities (Petrini 121).

However, even worthy projects must remain partial and ultimately fail, because a new model of production cannot be evaluated apart from the social relations of capital it would be subordinate to. When de-industrialization happens in capitalism, it is a product of crisis: capital must destroy excess value and relies frequently on war and recession to do so (Glassman 621). By ignoring the real history of capitalist crisis, localism can create a regressive politics.

This is clearest in some localists' denunciations of the movements of people across borders. This can come from a critique of the power of capital: "[cosmopolitan globalism weakens national boundaries and the power of national and subnational communities, while strengthening the relative power of transnational corporations" (Daly

93). National boundaries are also used to exclude, and some localists are conscious of the nativism implicit in this argument, as Shuman supports local communities "here and abroad" creating relations of self-reliance (114). However, localists apply the neoclassical principle of scarcity to people, suggesting that moderate resource use by self-sufficient communities will prevent the violence that large-scale trade has precipitated (Schumacher

42). Shuman agrees that a "country made up of self-reliant communities will have very

95 little rational reason to invade or coerce another country for resources" (217).

Schumacher finds historical precedents in the self-sufficient communities that existed in feudal Europe, where "people were relatively immobile. People who wanted to move did so... There were communications, there was mobility, but no footlooseness." People were prohibited from migration by the high cost of transport. "Trade in the pre-industrial era was not a trade in essentials, but a trade in... luxury goods, spices, and - unhappily - slaves.... the movement of populations, except in periods of disaster, was confined to persons who had a very special reason to move" (51).

It is true that populations moved less due to the technical limitations of pre­ capitalist Europe, but trade and war also provided an impetus to mercantilist economies.

Luxury goods played an essential role in feudal politics, while the capture, transport and working to death of slaves were integral to the development of capitalism (Marx "Capital

Volume One" 915). The history of conflict suggests dominant classes use available resources to commit whatever violence is necessary to control the surplus and defend private property (Engels "Origin" 107).

Yet by creating an ahistorical link between violence and trade, localists can claim that a steady-state economy will eliminate the former. McKibben argues that in the face of fuel shortages, "a relatively self-sufficient county or state or region" will benefit from

"durable economies... [rather] than dynamic ones" by promoting community values and democracy (McKibben 231). "Dynamic" is bad, "durable" is good. "Now, a great deal of structure has collapsed, and a country is like a big cargo ship in which the load is in no way secured. It tilts, and all the load slips over, and the ship founders" (Schumacher 51).

96 An idealization of the static ensues:

It is in robust, local-scale economies that we find genuinely 'free' markets:

free of corporate manipulation, hidden subsidies, waste, and immense

promotional costs... Decentralization is a prerequisite for the rekindling of

community in Western society. Mobility erodes community, but as we put

down roots and feel attachment to a place, our human relationships

deepen" (Schumacher qtd. in Norberg-Hodge 199).

Migration brings displacement, alienation and excessive resource use. Describing a local arts scene (reliant on imported food and transplanted cultural industry workers),

Estill suggests "it is entirely possible to be immersed in ideas, music, art, literature, and the stuff of culture without ever leaving town" (95). This parochialism has its roots in a dislike of non-local workers, who do not contribute to local economies: "people who live in a community have a vested interest in strengthening that community. Those are the ones who accept and receive local currency. People who live far away take their expertise, and their spending power, home with them each night" (173). Since value for localists is created only through exchange, there is no benefit to having more foreign workers, and Estill demands the end of commuting, refusing to hire non-locals (173).13

As an alternative, Schumacher proposes local industries for capital-poor regions,

13 Libertarian Municipalism is aware of these ideological contradictions, perhaps not surprisingly, since it is closely aligned to the revolutionary political tradition and maintains a critical distance from localism. Biehl and Bookchin warn that small communities can become parochial: "if their range of political vision were narrowed from the national level... to the comparatively miniscule town or neighbourhood level, then they might well withdraw into themselves at the expense of wider consociation... A kind of municipal tribalism could spring up, one that shelters injustices or even tyrannies within" (94). However, her defence of smallness is that discrimination also arises in Statist societies: "Indeed, human rights abuses have most often been perpetrated by States" (95). A consistent localist argument would argue the benefits of small, self-governing states, not simply the negatives of present abuse from large-scale sources.

97 so workers do not have to migrate (145). McRobie generalizes this to call for "rural industrialization based on small-scale manufacturing" (23). These are not regressive per se; since people stay rooted in particular places due to complex cultural, social and historical reasons, an economy that met human needs would respect these choices instead of forcing migration and provide means to create local industries. However, the point is to enhance democratic control over the capital relations that drive this process. People should have a choice not only about whether to leave but over whether to stay.

However, Schumacher has no sympathy for workers drawn into large-scale migration. He castigates "dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples" (42). The "unknown peoples" themselves are suspicious: "the movement of populations, except in periods of disaster, was confined to persons who had a very special reason to move... But now everything and everybody has become mobile. All structures are threatened, and all structures are vulnerable to an extent that they have never been before" (51). If catastrophe is the inevitable outcome of industrialism, technology and size, then people must be prevented from pursuing those things. If they persist in desiring the standard of living of the Global

North, then they are at fault for being too greedy and wanting to consume more. As

McKibben warns, "how on earth do you grow at the rate the Chinese are growing, and not collapse?" (187).

It is not economies and countries "out of balance", as Schumacher contends, but the push to internationalize the production of surplus value that calls forth migration

(Mandel "Late Capitalism" 324). Capitalism "necessarily creates mobility of the

98 population, something not required by previous systems of social economy and impossible under them on anything like a large scale" (Lenin "Development" 598).

Globalization has promoted firms setting up factories around the world to take advantage of specific conditions, one of which is less expensive labour power. The need for the latter depends on the TCC, as not all new surplus value appropriated in the Global North has the commensurate variable capital available to purchase at home. The barrier to this purchase depends on existing levels of mechanization and barriers to capital export: both can encourage migration, as "labour-power streams from the less developed marginal areas into the industrial centres of Western Europe for the very reason that capital does not (or does not sufficiently) flow out of these centres into those marginal areas" (Mandel

"Late Capitalism" 325).

In short, to understand the capital and human populations flows out of the Global

South requires an analysis of imperialism. As of 2009, an estimated 11.1 million undocumented workers in the U.S. generate much of the surplus value in agriculture and construction (Domata and Argenta 531; Lowell and Fry 2-3). Workers must sell their labour power at the best possible price and move to do so. In practice this means being geographically mobile according to the needs of accumulation and disrupting traditional settlement patterns, accepting whatever wages and work forms that capitalists offer

(Harvey "Limits" 381). Absolute mobility is forbidden; mobility according to capital's needs is encouraged. Land ownership, high rents, restrictive immigration policies, and various incentives and disincentives discourage or forbid workers from leaving the labour market.

99 These point towards strategic, political questions about who gets to own property and who has to move to sell their labour power. A localist analysis that conflates industrialism, technology and capitalism serves to draw attention away from the latter's contradictions and towards individuals coping with their effects.

Conclusion

Viewing production solely through the lens of use-value and concrete labour renders localist theory unable to understand phenomena that arise from the growth of centralized capital. Pro-market localists think the scale of small business makes it more ethical, ignoring how they must also achieve SNALT in production. Anti-market localists propose alternative social economies but fail to see how decentralized economies create coordination problems. Industrialism stands in for the social consequences of unplanned growth, leading to unsupported claims about small-scale technology, and an attempt to mitigate the effects of capitalist market compulsion through the direct exchange of labours and alternative currencies. Applied to migrant labour, this form of individualism leads to some dubious criticisms of migration.

Therborn blames economists who accept the premises of capitalist political economy for having "limited horizons" whose reform "alternative has always had a curiously deja vu character: it has invariably turned out to be an idealized picture of the present system" ("Science" 96). Mill falls under this category: supportive of Chartism, he still opposed working class political rule and proposed production by individual cooperatives, acquired by workers obtaining their own capital, as opposed to taking it back from the capitalists (97). Walras, another neo-classical, also supported cooperative

100 commodity production as a means "to make everybody capitalists" (97). Localism may not be consciously neo-classical, but in attempting to create a society of small-scale producers, either through grassroots entrepreneurship or the anti-market social economy, it is invoking an idealized capitalism.

The notion of a lost community is not false; Marx has some sympathy for "the expropriation of the direct producers [which] was accomplished by means of the most merciless barbarism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions." However, these lost communities no longer exist: the predominance of petty-commodity production lies in capitalism's pre-history, and there is no third way: "the economy cannot function simultaneously according to the laws of competition and the compulsion to accumulate which arises from it, and according to the qualitatively different laws generated by the satisfaction of needs"

(Mandel "Late Capitalism" Note 61, 521). The localist answer is to ignore these deeply political questions altogether, repeating the mistakes of Proudhon and classical political economy.

Localism may not understand its own theory of value, but ironically this places it alongside Proudhon, who based his politics on an economy that had been marginalized by the middle of the nineteenth century. When Marx criticized Proudhon's concrete labour schemes, he wrote, "it is a pretty conception that - in order to reason away the contradictions of capitalist production - abstracts from its very basis and depicts it as a production aiming at the direct satisfaction of the consumption of the producers"

("Surplus Value Part Two" 495). 150 years later, in the face of oligopolies that did not

101 exist in Proudhon's day, localists are still advocating tiny alternatives at the margins of capital. The consequences of this become clear when examining one of localism's most popular applications: urban agriculture.

102 CHAPTER THREE: LOCALISM AND URBAN AGRICULTURE

Localism has a special relationship with food production: the latter is seen as central to both the economy and strategies to change it. Localism's focus on use-value makes food a natural focus; as Kingsolver says, "Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used" (211). Many localists make a number of linked claims about the benefits of local agriculture production, and further refine this concept to mean local production in cities, promoting a range of measures that can be grouped under the rubric of Urban Agriculture (UA). Although the scale of UA varies, it is generally taken to mean agriculture using simple technologies instead of the large-scale cultivators and processing of agribusiness, and more fundamentally, small-scale ownership of farms. This chapter will examine UA through two phenomena integral to the capitalist mode of production: centralization and rent. The centralization of capital through the land is central to agriculture, structuring the conditions in which small-scale owner-occupiers produce.

Urban farming can occupy niches of the capitalist marketplace; however, it can neither replace large-scale agriculture nor provide the use-values its proponents claim for it.

Attempts to mechanically impose models from the Global South will also fail, because

UA's expansion is bounded by rising land values expressed in rent. UA's limitations suggest changes in the food system must be linked to challenges to the political economy of capitalism itself.

To discuss these claims, it is helpful to start with an empirical example: Detroit.

Once the centre of American auto manufacturing, Detroit has seen years of industrial decline, culminating in bankruptcies for General Motors and Chrysler, with 150,000 jobs

103 eliminated in the current recession (Clark). The urban population has fallen from its peak of 1.9 million to 850,000 and is expected to shrink further to 700,000. Whole neighbourhoods have disappeared; 17,000 acres of urban land have been left vacant. The city now has the highest poverty and foreclosure rates, and one of the highest official unemployment rates of 27 percent in the U.S. (McKee and Ortolani; Whitford). The stretched city government must provide services to 55,000 vacant lots. In a bid to generate revenue, the city is clearing homes and selling lots to developers for one dollar, if they agree to pay property tax. If still no buyers materialize, then land can be used for environmental preservation.

These circumstances have attracted Hantz Farms L.L.C., which plans to create

"the world's largest urban farm" in east Detroit, paying $30 million to create a 50 acre plot to grow produce, generate electricity from methane and wind power and recycle bio- waste (Hantz Farms). It will feature "the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximise productivity in cramped settings." Planting will take place in straight lines and include trellised (vertically planted) orchards. These technical innovations stem from existing agribusiness: as Matt Allen, Hantz's project manager explains, "We had to make it profitable and sustainable, so let's go see what normal farmers are doing and how normal farmers stay in business" (Kaffer).

Hantz Farms is taking advantage of the catastrophe scenario of hollowed-out post- industrial cities. Costs have so far averaged $3,000 per acre and, to recoup losses and make a profit, Hantz will not invest unless given free land and special, lower-tax zoning

104 (Whitford). CEO John Hantz, a fan of Ayn Rand with a net worth of $100 million, describes the project in neoclassical language: "We can't create opportunities, but we can create scarcity." If he buys up enough land, it will become valuable when someone else wants it: "We need a big project that takes a large chunk of property off the market in a constructive way" (Kraffer). By funding UA, Hantz can raise the value of both his land and the surrounding lots: If successful, he expects the development to generate tourism and supplementary development (Whitford). The project has been delayed since, due to the volume of properties being abandoned, land values keep dropping and scarcity in land remains elusive.

Hantz Farms' aggressive expansion suggests the power of exchange-value to dominate use-value. Detroit would presumably provide an excellent trial ground for localist development: it combines a declining but still substantial population, a lack of public or private sector development and cheap land. However, even in this best-case scenario for localist UA, the market structures the use-values that can be generated. This is due to the centralization of capitalism in agriculture and the regulatory function of rents. Both factors determine the size, longevity and capital-intensive use of agricultural plots.

The localist critique of large-scale agriculture

Capital has created economies of scale in agriculture: "soy and corn output has doubled since 1964; each farmer increased hourly output 12-fold between 1950 and 2000; food prices since 1948 rose at less than half of general prices" (Roberts "No-Nonsense"

55). Since the Second World War, 70 percent of agricultural land in the mid-western

105 United States has been transformed into large monoculture corn or soybean crops

(Kingsolver 15). What Kingsolver dubs "the well-oiled machine we call Late Capitalism" produces lowest-cost goods for the market and those who can afford to buy its commodities (14). This restructuring has caused a loss of biodiversity: for example, 92.8 percent of lettuce varieties became extinct between 1903 and 1983. The narrowing of biodiversity is mirrored by the narrowing of corporate ownership at the top of the production chain. Six agribusinesses control 98 percent of seed sales across the globe

(Petrini 58, 51). Four companies control 81 percent of U.S. beef production; another four control over 70 percent of fluid milk sales in U.S., while four more control 85 percent of global coffee roasting. Five companies control 75 percent of global seed market in vegetables (McKibben 53). These economies exist in distribution as well as production: by 1996, 85 percent of Canadian supermarkets, directly corporate-branded or nominally independent, were owned by 10 food distributors, leading some advocates to label the

Canadian food system as "oligopolistic" ("Food Retail Access" 1,4).

Localism consistently links the mass production of capitalism and its subsidization of lowest-cost production techniques to the degradation of food quality.

This is the erasure of use-value by exchange-value or, as Petrini puts it, the replacement of geography and climate by the market when determining food use (71). The localist response to this process is to reverse growth in food production. According to Petrini, to fix large-scale farming environmental damage we "must begin... by rejecting everything that is unnaturaV (119).14 His demands include eliminating intensive monoculture

14 This claim accepts an old binary opposition between the social/human and natural. As political

106 agriculture and using local varieties of plants and animals. This is not just about technique, however, but about small producers, both farmers and artisans, building a new relationship with the land based on complexity and sustainability (122; McKibben 206).

Petrini recognizes some of the broader implications these relationships create, calling for government support for "the rebirth of a new rurality... a place to live where the quality of life is guaranteed." This extends to far-reaching directives on not just consumption but production: everyone should control their own food supplies and produce their own food by themselves (137).

Roberts summarizes the localist argument for UA: the "common sense view that farming takes up too much scarce space to ever be practical in the city is just wrong.

Many crops can be grown intensively and economically on small plots that can be found anywhere in the city. With the possible exception of land, the city is as close as can be to most of the inputs that farmers need" (Roberts "The Way" 24). Food production does not require a similar infrastructure to other, more complex goods. Rather, food "transactions can be quite simple and direct - farmers bring their goods into town and townspeople buy the goods at a market, for example" (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 23). In a reflection of

Proudhon, simple commodity production and exchange is contrasted with a developed capitalist economy; the latter, controlled by middlemen, can be wrested back by artisanal producers.

Although localism claims that problems of long-distance food distribution began ecologists have pointed out, nature itself is not "natural" but a human construction of the essential and unchanging outside the social world. (Foster et al. 33). Rural spaces, supposedly more natural, are themselves the product of capitalist growth which, as shown above, which separated peasants from their holdings and forced them - and is still forcing them - to gravitate to the 'unnatural' built environments of cities.

107 with post-Second World War industrialization, American agronomists like Henry Caring and George Waring identified the issue in the 1850s. They criticized how the separation of city and country, and the consequent long-distance trade between the two, permanently depleted the land, as the agricultural methods of the time stripped the soil and farmers shipped nutrients one-way to the towns (Foster 153). These works influenced Justus von

Liebig, an agronomist of the first era of agricultural chemistry in the mid-nineteenth century, whose work in turn influenced Marx when he was writing Capital Volume One.

In Capital, Marx provides a prescient account of localism. His chapter on large-scale industry identifies the spatial contradictions created by capitalism, in which the act of concentrating and improving the productive forces also disrupts the conditions for the reproduction of the soil (637). In Volume Three, he argues that industry and industrial agriculture are driven to make short-term gains at the expense of environmental sustainability: "the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profit - stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations" (754 Footnote 27). The fact that by the 1850s British agriculture was already importing guano from Peru to be used as fertilizer showed that large-scale agriculture was incapable of sustaining itself and had to rely on foreign inputs.

Imperialism exacerbated the metabolic rift between country and city, such as when

English landowners worked Irish soil to infertility (Foster 164).

The criticism of large-scale agriculture has a genuine intersection with Marx's concept of generational stewardship of the earth. However, Marx also understood that

108 agribusiness is the outcome of capital applied to land. Roberts does not acknowledge how capital centralization has created efficiencies and market-power. The "possible exception of land" is the most important factor structuring the use-value of fresh produce near cities. To understand the limits of UA, it is necessary to trace briefly the history of capital on the land.

When Schumacher argues that "human life can continue without industry, whereas it cannot continue without agriculture", he creates a false dichotomy: capital, the progenitor of large-scale industry, developed from property relations on the land (88;

"Capital Volume One" 637). Pre-capitalist agriculture operated according to strict rules of custom. In Europe, tenant farmers on large feudal estates worked a set amount of time for the lord or gave up part of their crop yields to him. The remainder of time or produce belonged to the labourer and could be consumed or traded.

Capitalist social relations destroyed these fixed relations. Even before the creation of large-scale industry, capital attempted to transform agriculture by applying industrial principles to feed large populations of wage labourers (Murray "Part One" 113). To do so, a class of landowners developed that enclosed the common lands, created large estates and prevented peasants from subsistence living, forcing them into wage labour on new large-scale farms (Mandel "Marxist" 286). This process of dispossession had far-reaching implications. Agriculture and handicraft separated as sites of production, leading to the creation of country and town as separate entities and the formation of the rural as a land without people (Lenin "Development" 38). The new cities created vast markets for produce, and crops began to be grown exclusively as commodities to meet this demand

109 rather than for personal use. Landlords extracted the maximum amount of rent possible from tenants, forcing them to work harder and create lower-price goods by increasing production. The new proletarian workforce provided both labour and market for the developing capitalist division of labour (42).

This history is significant because it shows how the process of concentration of land ownership, the creation of agribusinesses, and the erosion of a peasant, artisanal class was well underway in the Global North hundreds of years ago. In fact, Marx identified the dispossession of peasants as one of the key moments in the creation of the working class and thus capitalism as a whole. The localist plan to recreate pre-capitalist agriculture overlooks this history and fails to acknowledge the barriers to production that capital has overcome.

Social barriers to agriculture

Unlike other commodities, land is strictly a natural resource: except for a few marginal examples, labour cannot create it. The non-contiguous nature of plots and ownership rights often prevent acquisition of continuous territories (Mann 29). Moreover, capital assets in agriculture are initially in land and livestock, not labour-saving technology as in industry. Due to these factors, capital centralization is higher in agriculture than in other industries, as large amounts of capital are needed in order to obtain land and hire workers, restricting development to larger firms, which in turn provide the means for larger-scale agriculture (Foster 156). In the presence of capital and a guaranteed market for food, small farms become larger. In 1920, farms over 1,000 acres used 33 percent of American land; this proportion had increased to 60 percent by 1959

110 (Mandel "Marxist" 292). The number of farms over 1,000 acres grew by 14 percent between 1982 and 2002 (Key and Roberts). Large farms are more efficient: as output goes up, prices fall and farms need to be bigger to realize a profit. Thomas Dorr, the U.S.

Undersecretary for Agriculture in 2008, put the optimum size of a farm at 200,000 acres

(McKibben 56).

The concentration of ownership and the centralization of plots is a tendency, not a law. Pre-capitalist property relations survive and interact with capital, and there is a rich vein of Marxist scholarship describing imperialism, the relationship between fully capitalist economies and those into which capitalism has been implanted (Brewer 61).

This reveals an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, the number of small farmers has dropped precipitously. France lost half its farmers between 1982 and 1999, while

Germany experienced a 25 percent loss in the 1990s (Smith and MacKinnon 56). The

U.S. has lost two thirds of its farms since 1920, while only 2 percent of Americans still live on farms (57). 100,000 family farms disappeared every year in the 1950s and 1960s.

On the other hand, small-owned plots of land persist even in the capitalist economies of the Global North: owner-occupation increased during the 20th century. These conflicting tendencies demonstrate that small farms can, in particular circumstances, continue to perform useful services for capital.

Capital must circulate, and land that does not generate average profit will face tremendous pressure to change uses according to whatever is most profitable, either directly through higher upkeep payments or indirectly through having its value bid up

(Harvey "Limits" 348). Small farms lack the capital of larger farmers and can be

111 bankrupted by a single bad harvest. New owners must rely on bank or state credit to finance operations, allowing the latter institutions to dictate changes and technical improvements (Murray "Part Two" 19). Labour can only be applied for a short time when a harvest is mature; the inability to restrict production to labour time alone means less surplus value is created and capital in agriculture cannot attain average profits (Mann 34).

New technologies shrink how much land a farm family needs to sustain itself.

Small farms can survive by implementing intensive cultivation through investing capital or using highly-skilled labour (Mandel "Marxist" 291). This is a form of capital concentration (more invested per acre) rather than centralization (mergers and outright purchases of firms), demonstrating how small farms must respond to the same drives that larger capitals do.

Small farmers are often personally committed to a subsistence existence (Murray

"Part Two" 19).15 Resisting proletarianization and choosing to remain owner-occupiers, even when indebted, demonstrates 'irrational' market behaviour, which capital can use to its advantage. Debt sets external limits within which non-wage labour operates: owners must rely on bank, state or agribusiness credit to finance operations, allowing the latter

15 It is difficult to obtain labour for the temporary, intensive production processes that agriculture entails. Migrant workers fulfil this condition, with the added bonus that should wages should threaten profit rates, those workers can be fired (Mandel "Marxist" 294). In 1968, Mandel could claim that owner-occupying farmers exert downward pressure on all workers' wages, since they self-sacrifice to maintain their land- holdings (293). However, that pressure was already slackening; the numbers of self-employed in U.S. agriculture declined from 10.8 million in 1948 to 8.1 million in 1968. From 1967 to 2009, the number of self-employed in agriculture fell from 51.9% to 39.8% of the total (Hippie 19, 31). This is still a substantial number, but it seems more likely that downward wage pressure comes from employers themselves. In 2006, American-born workers consisted of only 23% of all hired farm workers in the U.S. and only 2% in California (Taylor 374). Since the "decrease in self-employment in agriculture is due mainly to a decline in the number of smaller farms and the emergence of large farming operations" (Hippie 18), and those farms largely subsist on migrant labour, it is not unrealistic to suggest that small farmers do not determine wages and working conditions for migrant workers. The former's utility to capital lies elsewhere.

112 institutions to dictate changes and technical improvements. Banks themselves are willing

to lend to owner-occupiers because they can sell their land to pay their debts, turning land

into a liquid asset (Tufts). When owner-occupiers are formally bound in credit

relationships, "the nominal 'owner-occupier' is probably better regarded as a manager or

even a labourer who receives a kind of 'piecework' share of the total surplus value

produced (Mandel "Marxist" 365). Family farms are reduced to crop managers with no

input into the production process (Murray "Part Two" 45). If farmers do go bankrupt, the

bank or agribusiness can seize their assets. As owners or managers, small-holders are not

a barrier to the formal or real domination of capital on the land.

Technical barriers to agriculture

In pre-capitalist production, agriculture was more productive than industry,

"because nature assists here as a machine and an organism, whereas in industry the

powers of nature are still almost entirely replaced by human action" (Marx "Surplus

Value Part Two" 110). However, capital created its own machines to solve the technical

problems of agricultural production: shortening production periods and the times between

them, separating the commodities into usable forms and transporting them without

deterioration (Murray "Part Two" 11). Mandel argues that "all the features of this

complex process of transformation in contemporary agriculture - increasing productivity

of labour; penetration of big capital; large-scale enterprise; accelerated division of labour

- can be summed up under the rubric of the growing industrialisation of agriculture"

("Marxist" 380). In fact, capital faces special pressures to industrialize agriculture more

than in other industries. Capital can only profit by circulating through the M-C-M'

113 process as quickly as possible, yet it cannot speed up the seasons or production time: the time it takes to mature crops, livestock and timber or to replete the soil. Capital in agriculture gets one circulation per year, from planting to harvest; capital in industry can repeat this many times in the same period. During industrial production, SNALT invariably falls below that of non-capitalist, petty commodity production, whereas agricultural production proves more resistant to speed-up (Mann 34). Harvesting a crop takes labour and adds value, but crop maturation does not require labour time and thus does not create value.

As in all industries, agricultural capital replaces workers by machines and makes technical improvements to the labour process, inputs and machines themselves. Since "it has been impossible to produce total output on confined areas of similar quality," agricultural machinery is an attempt to "reduce... the spatial constraints of land-based agriculture," overcoming the natural limits that land imposes (Murray "Part Two" 12;

Mann 39). Greater outputs require more land and more machinery to work it, while capital's need for continuous processing of agricultural commodities needs continuous harvests to supply the process. Machinery serves as both the tool and catalyst: it allows faster processing, and it must also operate constantly in order to realize average profits.

While machinery reduces the quantity of inputs, it also depreciates during production time while crops mature for harvest. Agricultural commodities are perishable and must be consumed quickly. Even for less-perishable commodities, the problem of storage arises, since consumption takes place constantly while production happens only once a year.

Price fluctuations result from many factors, including shrinkage during storage, pests and

114 poor climate. Agriculture's lengthy production time limits capital's ability to shift production according to market signals. Production cannot be augmented or reduced in precise quantities. Reduced production still requires maintenance costs (feed and cropland maintenance.) Food processing, futures markets and government subsidies also affect prices (37). Nature acts not simply as an input but as a factory floor, the site of production.

All these factors explain the frenetic character of capital's attempt to transform the land. Large plantations, organized as factories, are a way to create continuous machine processing and continuous harvesting. Meanwhile, capitalist agriculture has managed to overcome many natural barriers through advanced technology like reproductive manipulation of livestock and biotechnology along with growth hormones and genetic modification (42). Capital tries to create larger, more efficient preparations for production (tools), shorter growing seasons, fewer natural delays during and between growing periods (through irrigation, artificial daylight, etc.), better yields and better transport in all aspects of preparation, production and distribution (e.g. refrigeration).

These changes increased output per acre by 150 percent and output per worker by 210 percent from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s (21). The low price of food indicates capital has been largely successful in reducing the value in food production through the elimination of farm labour. The end result is bigger and cheaper production: "LDC [Less

Developed Countries] costs of agricultural production tend to be higher than those of large agro-industrial farms in ODCs [Over Developed Countries] (in part because so many negative externalities of industrial agriculture are not internalized)" (Daly and

115 Farley 339).

These issues are reflected in technical problems with localist UA. In the only meta-analysis of organic crops conducted, it was found that conventional crops fix more nitrogen while there are no differences in nutritional value between conventional and organic (Dangour et al.). Small farms produce less output than large ones without a corresponding reduction in energy consumption, despite claims to the contrary

(Woodhouse 445). These studies suggest that the claims for UA's better production and distribution are overstated.

Localist attempts to change agricultural use-values face three main barriers. First, agriculture is entirely subject to the law of value. Usually, small areas cannot create sufficient output to generate average profits, although Hantz Farms may prove that this barrier can be overcome with sufficient investment. However, Hantz's example also shows that a new firm must compete according to existing profit imperatives and meet

SNALT in production: machinery, and thus capitalization, is a necessary component of

production. As machinery is adopted, owner-occupiers who are unable to afford expensive equipment are subordinated to vertically integrated capitalist firms. Second, despite recent counter-trends towards an absolute larger number of small farms, larger

farms continue to grow in size and market share. Capital creates the conditions for

subsumption of smaller capitals into larger ones or, depending on conditions, the

persistence of small capitals under severe credit and managerial constraints. Third, new

technologies bring a proletarian workforce to agriculture (Mann 43). It is no more

possible to replace a working class in agriculture with small-scale UA, than it would be to

116 replace industrial commodity chains integrated across continents with artisanal entrepreneurs.

A few economic indicators are enough to demonstrate that the centralization of capital in agriculture, with its attendant effects, is growing. Figure 2 shows this development in the U.S. as a representative sample of the Global North. Output and value added steadily increase throughout the twentieth century. Output jumps dramatically after

The Second World War, with the application of industrial principles to agriculture. Net value added begins a dramatic, if fluctuating, climb in the late 1970s, around the same time neoliberalism came into being and American produce began to be dumped on the markets of the Global South. This demonstrates the economic and political power of capitalist agriculture, drawing on the power of the imperialist state to increase profits through monopoly control over global markets.

Figure 3 is comparative between the Global North and South and demonstrates some fundamental differences between the role of agriculture in their economies. The former are far more efficient and productive: workers add over 10 times the amount of value as workers in the Global South (the chart's scale is logarithmic). Capitalism is not simply a system of exploitation: Figure 3 shows that it also develops productive forces immensely, with the qualification that the imperialist relations demonstrated in Figure 2 factor into any value produced.

However, the development of the productive forces is not simply due to political control of markets: agriculture in the Global North is objectively more efficient. A rising

TCC marks "the stage of a developed capitalism", which Figure 4 shows (Fine 245). A

117 measure of the development of productive forces is the use of constant capital, in this case: tractors. Low-income farms as a whole are severely under-capitalized, with ten times fewer numbers of machines. Cuba is included as a data set because it is often touted as an example of localist UA development. However, its use of capital-intensive heavy machinery remains high even now.

Figures 5 shows Marx's prediction that employment in agriculture would decline as more capital was applied, replacing human labour with machinery and reducing the amount of value embodied in each commodity. The small percentage of workers in the

Global North employed in agriculture got even smaller over the last 30 years. Meanwhile,

Cuba, an economy of the Global South, relies heavily on agriculture, as the Special

Period spike demonstrates and is only beginning to diversify. (Unfortunately no data was available for Low Income Countries for Figures 5 to 7.) Figures 6 and 7 are less dramatic but demonstrate the steady decline in industrial production and the rise of service industries in the Global North. Cuba is an exception, as its industrial decline is due largely to political factors.

118 U.S. F arm Output and Net Value Added 1929 - 2007

110 100 90 80 I - - -Farm output 70 tooso -——-—Net Harm value added g « I 30 I 20 5 10 ! o 1025 1836 1945 1966 1066 1976 1866 1985 2005

Source: Table 7.3.3. Real Farm Sector Output, Real Oross Value Added, and Real Net Value Added, Quantity Indexes, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Figure 2

Value added per worker hi agriculture 1970-2005

100000

v> => 10000

Canada 1000 c — -United States m - - "High income 100 » Low income o 10 -i i i i i i i • • • • -i i i i i_ 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1996 2000 2005 Source: WDI Online World Development Indicators Figure 3 Tractors per 100 sq. km of arable land 1961 - 2005

1000

•v

100 / Canada — - Cuba - - -United States i • •1 i < •>» 1 High income * Low income 10 I I • I II I I 1960 1906 1970 1975 1980 1985 1980 1995 2000 2005 Source: WDI Online World Development Indicators Figure 4

119 Ennploymentin Agriculture (% of total) 1960 - 2007

30

25 —Canada V \ 20 -Cuba 15 'United States 10 —High income

1960 1995 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Source: WDI Online World Development Indicators Figure 5

E mployment in Industry (% of total) 1980 - 2007

35 30 25 "~™ i." 20 Canada 15 — -Cuba 10 • • *United States 5 High income 1 • 1 • . 1 ' ' 1 1 « . . . » « . 1960 1966 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 Source: WDI Online World Development Indicators Figure 6 E mployment in services (% of total) 1980 - 2007

90 80 70 60 50 Canada 40 — -Cuba 30 - - - United States 20 • High income 10 i i i i i i i b. -I L. i i i i i i 1960 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 Source: WDI Online World Development Indicators Figure 7

120 Urban agriculture in the Global South

The political power that accompanies centralization is demonstrated through neoliberal manipulation of global commodity markets. All the above figures demonstrate that barriers to establishing small-scale agriculture involve reversing long-term historical trends towards capitalization, imperial relations of trade, and even occupational and demographic shifts that have been firmly established for centuries. The Global South, still largely a site of small-scale agriculture, does not generate the same productivity or efficiency; were it even desirable to recreate that sort of economy, replacing or even just competing successfully with these dynamics would require revolutionary shifts in political, economic and social structures.

There is a wealth of information on local agriculture in the Global South (cf. Van

Veenhuizen, ed.). Since the political economy of North and South differ so greatly, this dissertation does not address it. However, because localist theorists often suggest projects in the latter can be a model for the former, it is worth considering some of their features.

There are real use-values available to agro-ecology and non-industrial production in the Global South. For example, forest, sea, meadow and insect production on common land provides nutrition for peasants (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 78). It is claimed that industrial land-use "overlooks" these hidden benefits. Yet were sufficient rents available from these kinds of production, they would be standardized and commodified, taking power out of the hands of producers. The commons would disappear, and as numerous

Marxists have pointed out, enclosure of the commons is an ongoing dynamic vital to capitalist growth itself. In the 1990s, village production in the Global South began to

121 struggle with the global commodification of rural production, a process England went through in the seventeenth century and which capitalism has repeated across the world

(Glassman 615). Social relations, and not the particular type of commodity, dictate scale.

Localists fail to understand that capital centralization, in a bid to achieve SNALT and generate rents, structure the food commodity chain at all levels.

To justify the claim that cheap food will disappear, necessitating a return to local agriculture, Roberts references the spike in food prices in late 2007 that saw prices for basic commodities increase 75 percent since 2005. However, his use-value analysis prevents him from understanding how the futures markets that set food prices work. It is not true that "high prices will not self-correct, because high prices are the corrective signal from the real world" (162). High food prices are based on the capitalization of future rents. These rents are achieved in the Global North through payment for Northern produce, facilitated by neoliberal restructuring of economies in the Global South. The forced lowering of import tariffs allows dumping of subsidised produce in Southern markets, destroying local production (Angus 8). The futures market allows commodity traders to speculate on increasing rents and has recently pushed up the price of foodstuffs well beyond what supply and demand dictated (Pace et al. 2).

Most importantly, subsidies ensure that even the least profitable lands in cultivation receive the differential rent on the world market normally reserved for the most productive land (Mandel "Marxist" 284). Without subsidies, cultivation on the least profitable land no longer yields average profits, unless another way is found of introducing shortages. This can include finding new uses for commodities; for example,

122 the recent increase in ethanol production has driven up prices for corn (Angus 6). Another option is simply to destroy 'excess' production in order to maintain prices. Brazil burnt

18 months of the world's coffee supply between 1932 and 1936, when it became cheaper to pay farmers not to cultivate than to overstock the world market and drive down prices

(Mandel "Marxist" 295). Finally, there can be a political solution, as when leading producers in the Global North to force open markets in the Global South to their 'excess' commodities. When land in the Global South, previously inaccessible to capital, also starts producing for the world market, overproduction results in what Mandel calls the

"permanent crisis" of agriculture ("Marxist" 285).

Cuba's urban farms

That permanent crisis may be bad for the peasants trying to compete with subsidized commodities, but it is extremely profitable and sets limits on what use-value- oriented UA can achieve. McKibben suggests that it is scaleable; despite his disavowal of

"socialism", he cites Cuba as a successful example of large-scale organic gardening (73).

Community gardening in Cuba arose out of the Special Period in the early 1990s, when the USSR collapsed along with its subsidies and trade, severely reducing caloric intake

(Roberts "No-Nonsense" 89). Cuba lacked Russian oil to power its farm machinery. With an urbanized population, putting farms in or near the city eliminated the need for transport costs to market, packaging and storage, and it provided urban wastes that served as fertiliser. Cuba was able to change 400,000 hectares of sugar production towards other forms of food, creating free or low-cost meals for children and adults at schools and workplaces (91). Urban vegetable production tripled during the 1990s and urban gardens

123 now comprise 12 percent of Havana's land (92). Cuba also has a long-standing concern with scientific environmental management and supports the principles of agro-ecology, incorporating both small and large-scale agricultural practices into production and accounting for environmental externalities (Levins 21).

In this respect, Cuba shows what an economy not dominated by capitalist rent pressures could accomplish. However, Cuba is an exception for internal and external reasons. Internally, by substituting human labour for machines, Cuba increased the value of its foodstuffs. In labour-intensive community gardens, the ratio of living to dead labour is very high, and this presumes an industry that has a low TCC. Normally this would raise prices; but since the state controls the land and labour markets and appropriates rent, it could both choose a higher-value form of cultivation and maintain lower prices.

No free market would allow this level of state intervention. The Cuban state established a command economy (Gropas 254). The community gardening policy arose out of military strategy, as Cuba planned for a long-term occupation by foreign powers and wanted its citizen-soldiers to be self-sufficient (Levins 22). Agricultural land is divided between state-controlled plots and cooperatives, which combine aspects of private and collective land ownership. Cuba allows some farmers' markets, but the

Ministry of Agriculture sets maximum prices. Cooperatives have titles to the land, but the farms must contain members of the Communist Party and sell produce at officially designated markets (Gropas 265). In an economy with a market in land, a high population density and a liberal democracy, urban farmland would be subject to speculation.

124 Cuba also faces severe external constraints. Its blockade prevents cheap commodities from the Global North, embodying far less value, from swamping its vegetable economy. Cuba must find some way of overcoming the barriers to investment.

In this respect, Havana's urban gardens represent a special example of DRII: capital applied intensively to the same small plots of land, improving it and allowing the state to reap the benefits. Its political and economic isolation allows the Cuban state to act as a landowner, blocking (or being blocked from - it makes no difference theoretically) investment and allowing it to determine land use, according to the need to grow food or get foreign currency.

The only other government making organic farming official policy is Hamas in the Gaza Strip; also facing international isolation, it is unable to obtain fertilizer or machinery (Elmer). It was not more expensive to pay for industrial agriculture, it was impossible: the source of oil and capital-intensive machinery simply disappeared. This kind of deus ex machina delights localists, who rely on the peak oil thesis to predict the growth of small scale production: as Roberts says, "Cuba-type scenarios (will) become more common in a world of increasing climate chaos and resource scarcity" ("No-

Nonsense" 101). However, stripped of its emotive appeal, Cuban UA was a response to crisis: for its political survival, the Cuban regime had to find new sources of nutrition and created moral incentives to justify the material sacrifice it required. The state could "no longer fully provide foodstuffs for the population in quite the same way as it did before the Special Period... rural people are henceforth called upon to work the land under new models of production incentives" (Gropas 253). The popular upheavals of 2011 in the

125 Middle East arose in part from higher food prices that have caused unrest across the globe (Treanor), showing that revolution, and not volunteer community gardening, is another possible outcome to crisis.

Belo Horizonte and local food distribution

The Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, a metropolis of 2.5 million people, implemented a number of food security measures. It created farmers' markets to eliminate wholesalers and subsidized restaurants for the urban poor, meals for school children, regulated prices for staple goods, set up nutrition classes and community gardens and distributed consumer information on prices (Lappe 4). These measures halved infant mortality and malnutrition and cost only two percent of the city budget (5).

They have also helped small farmers, by providing transport support to bring their produce to market, maintaining prices and therefore the farmers' livelihood (99).

Although little information on the local political economy is available in English, a few facts are applicable. 77 percent of agricultural workers in Brazil are employed in small farms (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 100). Farms under 10 hectares are only 2.3 percent of all agricultural land but are half of all holdings. Large-scale agriculture demonstrates the opposite: farms over 1,000 hectares are one percent of all holdings while taking up 45 percent of agricultural land (Rocha and Aranha 3). From this it appears Brazilian agriculture is highly capitalized and developed unevenly. As Mandel shows, this accords with regular capitalist development, which can implant owner-occupiers in larger market structures while maintaining non-capitalist labour forms intact. As with Cuba, it is necessary to question how generalizable these measures are. As Rocha and Aranha admit,

126 "agrarian reform is beyond the scope of municipal governments' policies" (3). In its place governments are supposed to compensate for the existing ownership structures. Belo

Horizonte's administration is the largest purchaser of local produce. Governments have traditionally kept food prices low in urban centres; however, to maintain political legitimacy, they must subsidize small-scale producers themselves. Although absolute costs are low, this situation depends on a lack of absolute rents being generated in agriculture, and the lack of differential urban rents being generated that would bring developer pressure to bear on municipal government.

UA advocates suggest Toronto could grow 10 percent of its fresh produce within its own borders ("Phase II" 42). However, this assumes a pool of unemployed, unskilled agricultural labour available for food production. Cuba employs 10 people per hectare in agriculture: 300,000 people out of a population of 11 million. This is far less technically efficient than U.S. agriculture, as Figure 5 shows - however, in the context of the Special

Period it is "socially efficient" (Levins 22). Organic food production is more labour- intensive, and mass unemployment is something poor countries have in abundance.

Roberts suggests that "Brazil's and Cuba's successes confirm that hunger can be addressed by governments with modest resources; to that extent, action and victory are matters of political will" ("No-Nonsense" 102). Politics is essential for food organizing, but the problem is structural: capitalist political economy has immiserated and developed

Brazil and Cuba unevenly, and "modest resources" can at best mitigate the damage.

The conditions of production in the Global South are not reproducible in the

Global North, except in the catastrophist schemes of the localists. As Roberts

127 acknowledges, there are "profound differences in the ecology, crops, food production methods and people's history of countries in the Global South and North" (57). From a

Marxian perspective, these differences reflect the level of formal or real subsumption of the land to capital and the organic composition of capital. Food production in the Global

South may still generate non-capitalist use-value, "a way of life that connected with great forces in the universe, not simply a way of making a living." However, as capitalist social relations grow, food production is inserted into international markets and develops as part of capitalist industrial organization.

What is rent?

The largest impact of centralization is rent, which does not deserve its status as one of the more arcane aspects of Marxian political economy (Katz 64; Murray "Part

One" 101). It is beyond the scope of this thesis to encapsulate that debate;16 for the purposes of this dissertation, rent describes the impetus driving land markets and thus signals the social, rather than solely physical or technical nature of land-use under capitalism. Finally, rent theory suggests a way to theorize relations of production and space together.

Marx developed a theory of rent in order to understand how land appears to produce value, despite the latter being the product of the purchase of the commodity labour-power alone. Rent, like commodity relations, is an appearance of capitalist social relations. Land, as part of nature, is appropriated according to specific social relations arising from the history of capitalism (Foster 167). The capital-land relation must be

16 For a broader discussion, and in particular the distinctions between absolute, monopoly and differential rents, see: Mandel ("Marxist"), Fine, Ball's reply and chapters 11-12 of Harvey ("Limits").

128 contextualized within the capital-labour relation (Murray "Part Two" 29).

Classical political economy and rent

Classical political economy created rent theory to explain the power of landed interests ranged against the rising industrial bourgeoisie. Ricardo believed that value is produced on land by labour, while profit is that portion of the surplus remaining after paying the price of labour's reproduction (Edel 2). For him, landlords were parasites who interfered with this process. They appropriated part of the surplus as rent, a subtraction from the total value produced (Murray "Part One" 102). As population grew, more food would be needed and farmers would be forced to expand cultivation onto lower-quality soils. This would lower labour productivity and raise prices. Rent would take an ever- increasing portion of this surplus and shrink the profits accruing to capital (Hunt 98).

From this analysis, he predicted a general tendency for profits to fall (Murray "Part One"

103).

However, Ricardo felt that as technical progress and free trade made high quality land available at home and overseas, this would lower food production costs, wages and rent. Even if wages did not go down, they would become a smaller portion of the larger total surplus, increasing relative profits. This would undermine the power of landed interests and capital would supersede landed property (Edel 3). Later populists, such as

Henry George, thought rent was solely a product of monopoly power over land.

Therefore capital and labour had a common interest in reducing the amount of surplus that landed property appropriated (4).

Proudhon developed a similar thesis in which rents represented the ability of

129 landlords to exclude others from property use, hence his famous maxim, 'property is theft'. He thought interest rates determined rents, which represented the rate of return to landed property. However, this did not explain how land values, which determine interest rates, are themselves determined. This circular reasoning led to reformist political solutions: Proudhon advocated creating a People's Bank that would make low-interest loans to everyone, thus eliminating property monopolies that allowed financiers to charge high rents or interest rates on mortgages. However, owning land rather than renting it simply changes the creditor from a landlord to the bank. The price of the land will be reflected in the mortgage, which is the "capitalized value of the rent", what the bank decides it can get for the property in lieu of renting it (Murray "Part One" 114). This would have the unintended effect of raising demand for land, creating higher land prices and raising rents once more (5). Proudhon could not reform aspects of the market without dealing with the underlying contradictions of the value form.17

Classical political economy restricted itself to determining how to redistribute the social surplus, removing rent from historical analysis. Ricardo treated rent categories as fixed due to natural factors like land, population fertility and minimum subsistence needs.

Capital received diminishing returns on investment on the most marginal land, where it was just profitable enough to produce and still generate rents. The exchange value of agricultural commodities was therefore determined "according to the least productive unit of capital." The least productive margin was assumed, while the socially determined size

17 Neoclassical economics marginalized this debate, quite literally: from the relation between two branches of the ruling class, rent theory has been reduced to treating land as another factor in production subject to marginal returns (Murray "Part One" 101).

130 of the unit of agricultural capital was not considered (Fine 256).

For Marx, the generation of different kinds of rent depended on how value is created. The labour socially necessary to produce a commodity at the average profit is set by competition between capitals within a sector (244). This process establishes market

value. The competition to achieve these values determines the surplus profits that can be

appropriated as rent.18

Absolute rent

Rent can be further subdivided into three categories. Absolute rent (AR) deducts a

portion of the surplus by raising the prices of agricultural products (Mandel "Marxist"

280). Under normal conditions, those capitalists who can use more efficient methods, like

replacing human labour with machines, will reduce the amount of value embodied in

each commodity to below market value and generate surplus profits. These will attract

other capitals into the sector, equalizing profits and re-establishing average rates of profit

across industries.

However, the technical problems of agriculture discussed above present barriers

to profit equalization, delaying the adoption of new technologies and thus "produc[ing]...

additional surplus value because of the higher proportion of living labour employed"

(Fine 259). The intervention of landed property appropriates the additional surplus value

generated, forcing prices above production costs and creating AR (258). This leads to

18 Competition between sectors levels out their different market values. This creates market prices "which are cost-prices that are different from [i.e. lower than] the actual market values" (Marx qtd. in Fine 244). In competition within a sector, "unequal rates of profit are established... [while between sectors] they are eroded" (246). Surplus profit is created when individual values are reduced below market values, and commodities then cost less to make. Producers earning below-market values are charged rent, while profit is equalized for all capitalists (253).

131 market prices that are higher than production prices. The barrier of AR raises the cost of machinery and direct labour to the extent that capital can refuse to invest in production on land because average profits do not compensate for its increased costs (Edel 6).

AR signifies that landlords are in a position to appropriate extra surplus value, so that the capitalist owners of commodities only realize average value. Thus "absolute rent can exist without in any way infringing the law of value." Rent does not drive up prices, as Ricardo thought: higher prices, due to the inability to equalize profits on land, create rent (Harvey "Limits" 351).

Monopoly rent

Monopoly rent is the appropriation of the entire surplus value, not just the difference between production and market value (Fine 258). The monopoly power of landowners over land interferes with profit-taking as a whole, preventing the free flow of capital in and out of agriculture, limiting the production of surplus value and redistributing it towards landowners (Harvey "Limits" 353; Mandel "Marxist" 279). With monopoly rent, farmers have no financial interest in improving the land, as higher productivity will simply be absorbed through higher rents. However, the ability of landowners to charge monopoly prices for the use of their land does not mean they will find tenants. Producers who rent the land may not be willing to pay higher rents and charge more for their products. This can also slow accumulation in agriculture compared to other industries (282).

Differential rent

Marx theorized differential rent from agricultural produce, whose selling price is

132 determined by the cost of production on land that is least profitable (due to growing conditions, geography, etc.)- Better-than-average land requires less labour and is therefore cheaper to produce upon. Two conclusions follow. First, products from the least-cultivable land will continue to realize their value, what it costs to reproduce the workforce and equipment. The production price of this least-cultivable, or most marginal land, determines the minimum market price: if it cost any more, it would no longer be economical and the land would fall out of production. Second, production on better land will earn excess profits, as production costs are lower and more surplus is generated

(Harvey "Limits" 354).

There are two forms of differential rent. Differential Rent I (DRI) refers to extensive development, assuming equal amounts of capital applied to land of unequal quality. Differential Rent II (DRII) is intensive, determined by unequal amounts of capital applied to land of the same quality (Marx "Capital Volume Three" 816). Those who invest more capital, and gain returns accordingly, achieve lower prices of production than those applying average amounts (Harvey "Limits" 355). However, DRII turns into

DRI, as successive investments make permanent improvements to the overall fertility of the land, changing what qualifies as worst quality land. Better land attracts more investment, while new technologies become generalized (357).

Marxian DRII

While DRI assumes existing, natural differences in fertility, DRII presumes that capital will generate higher productivity, overcoming natural fertility and technical production barriers (Fine 253). From a Marxian perspective, DRII comes from the size

133 and social weight of capital: "The significance... [of] unequal capitals is their unequal size as a source of productivity increase and surplus-profits Just as in industry a normal minimum (and average) level of capital is established, on the basis of which surplus profits are earned by accumulating large capitals, so in agriculture the same applies" (251) (Italics added).

Two conclusions apply. First, DRII formulates rent as a function of "obstacles to the development of capital accumulation [on the land] rather than the static formulation of the distribution of surplus value in the form of rent", as Ricardo believed (253). Those obstacles are not simply which section of the capitalist class - landed, financial or productive - appropriates the surplus value created, but the availability of credit to deepen capitalist social relations on the land. Those who accept Ricardo's diminishing returns at the margin, based on fixed, natural qualities in land, simply "reorganize the technical assumptions" of rent theory, rather than seeing how it is embedded in social relations of credit (269). Second, and centrally for this dissertation, size matters: capital attempts to overcome natural barriers and generate DRII by applying more capital. This provides a key linkage between the two dynamics described in this chapter: rent comes from the availability of credit, which arises from and augments the centralization of capital. The inherent tendencies of capital on the land, centralization and the generation of rent, work together to structure the creation of value in agriculture. Any theory of urban agriculture must incorporate how large capital and plots begin with a social advantage, by virtue of their size, over small capitals.

134 The contemporary relevance of rent

Rent plays a coordinating role in capitalism, equalizing profits and forcing producers to introduce new methods to recapture those profits, rather than simply appropriating existing fertility advantages (Harvey "Limits" 361). If enough surplus capital exists that cannot find profitable investment, land will become an attractive holding. However, just like capital invested in other assets, the capital invested in land must earn interest. As "fictitious capital" i.e. not-yet-realized value, land trades according to how much rent it can generate (347).

When rent is spent as money capital (i.e. invested in future production), it becomes part of the financial sector, which acts to both expand production and centralize capital, appropriating income from many small producers. Its impact is technical and social:

[r]ent - as the price of land - may not determine the price of the product

directly, but it determines the method of production, whether a large

amount of capital is concentrated on a small area of land, or a small

amount of capital is spread over a large area of land, and whether this or

that type of product is produced... the market price of which covers the

rent most effectively (Marx "Surplus Value Part Three" 515).

In accomplishing these tasks, rent shapes how production takes place. For example, since rent is "dependent on capital's inability to reproduce the conditions of production," capital will develop new technologies and even change the landscape to overcome it (Mandel "Marxist" 284). Anywhere land-use can be reduced, as with factory

135 farms or hydroponics, capital-intensive farming is possible and will supplant smaller forms (44). Industrial farming is therefore not simply about efficiency but the social relations of land use, circumventing an older form of property. This development, in turn, leads to industrial forms of agriculture inaccessible to smaller capitals.

Rent's coordinating function for capital is not straightforward. During a recession, producers with higher costs or lower profits are squeezed out and their assets are centralized by remaining firms (Murray "Part One" 118). The ability of capital to flow from sector to sector, while destructive to individual capitals, is vital to establish equilibrium and rationalize capitalism as a whole. However, rent allows inefficient landlords to maintain their control over the land without making improvements, as they can still earn absolute rent. Since land cannot be liquidated like other assets, efficient producers will simply earn higher differential rents (119).

Just as individual capitalists compete against one another despite their common class interests, rent coordinates capital through a 'push-pull' relationship. Capitalists invest in new technologies to avoid rent. Landowning capitalists signal new land uses to achieve rents. When describing rent's impacts, it is important to recognize that what appear as contradictory interests resolve themselves into the needs of capital as a whole at a higher level of abstraction.

Fine warns against applying rent categories ahistorically: "rent cannot be analysed simply on the basis of its effects - such as the barrier to capitalist investment." If this were true, then rents would automatically arise under "any obstacle to capitalist investment" (248). Surplus profits do not explain rents, otherwise rent would exist in all

136 industries. Natural differences in productivity do not explain the social categories of

profit or rent: rent is solely a product of the barriers to investment posed by landed

property. If capital was able to destroy landed property, rent would disappear as well,

becoming unnecessary for a theory of production or distribution. Fine concludes that

"therefore there is no general theory of rent, nor can the conclusions reached for one

instance in which a rent relation exists be automatically applied to others" (248).

However, rent remains necessary for understanding how value operates through

land, and urban land in particular, for three reasons. First, landed property has been

transformed historically into a capitalist form of ownership. Ricardo dealt with rent

strictly in terms of landed property: those landowners who possessed capital but did not

produce on the land they own. Marx, however, defined modern agriculture as "pursued

by capitalists, who are distinguished from other capitalists, first of all, simply by the

element in which their capital and the wage-labour that it sets in motion are invested... the

farmer produces wheat, etc. just as the manufacturer produces yarn or machines"

("Capital Volume Three" 751). Agriculture is wholly subsumed within capitalist social

relations, a premise that is more valid today than when Marx wrote.

As productive forces developed, entrepreneurial landowners stopped exhausting

land and labour to achieve immediate maximum surpluses, removed themselves from the

production process and gave capitalists control over production, receiving rent in return.

By investing their rents into further enterprises, landlords became financiers and

transformed into another fraction of the capitalist class. The aristocratic landlords, who expanded reproduction while blocking the development of capitalist social relations, have

137 disappeared; today's landowners exist as "a faction of money capitalists who have simply chosen, for whatever reason, to hold a claim on rent rather than on some other form of future revenue" (Harvey "Limits" 348). Land and industrial capital are simply two different sources of interest-bearing capital and different means to appropriate surplus value (Fine 248). There are still problems of coordination: capital must flow through the means of production to realize surplus value, and that process may be located on land owned by someone else (Harvey "Limits" 355). But there are only sectional interests preventing equalization: there are no separate class interests between landowners and production owners (Bryan 180). Since its main premise is the existence of capital in agriculture, rent is more applicable in advanced capitalist societies.

Second, rent forms an aspect of spatial theory, articulating the relationship between spatial organization and capital accumulation. At its simplest level, different kinds of concrete labours take place in different locations, and to trade and realize value, they must change location (Harvey "Limits" 375). Thus competition has a spatial element: capitalists compete for the best location, in terms of land price, infrastructure and distance to market (388). Locational advantage can provide a temporary spatial fix to the contradictions of accumulation. However, as with fertility advantages, any profits from a better location will be taxed in the form of higher rents, or overall rents will be lowered when other capitalists enter equally beneficial locations (391).

Particularly in urban areas, land-use must take space into account: for example, there is more to compel capital onto particular lands because space is so limited from the outset (349). The law of value ensures that land use must be committed to future labour

138 activities in particular spaces, as long as there is an interest-bearing loan of capital to be repaid (372). By seeking more productive land uses for higher rents, landowners can encourage investment in particular spatial forms such as transport. When landowners create permanent investments like soil improvement or physical infrastructure, this will create locational rents for the plot in question and those surrounding it. This also forces future labour into configurations that may not be profitable or conform to the reproduction needs of the workforce, risking speculative bubbles and crises (370).

Once capitalist property rights are established, locational advantages such as market proximity allow owners to gain excess profits (339). Determining those advantages depends on a host of technical and social factors, such as workers' need to live close to their workplace and whether capital can either improve transport to open new lands to use or improve existing land (341). An understanding of space as a barrier to profit equalization helps explain how the market, not the use-value of particular sites, determines land-use in cities.

The concept of locational rents (403) risks redundancy since, as Harvey himself acknowledges, "Rent is that theoretical concept through which political economy... traditionally confronts the problem of spatial organization"; in other words, rent itself is always locational (337). Locational rents can be understood as a way to describe the urban application of DRII: the temporary spatial advantages that accrue to landowners as a result of intensive application of capital on plots in the city.

By transforming fertility into location, Harvey may be substituting an analogy for a historically specific social phenomenon, using rent as a description of the distribution of

139 surplus value rather than investigating how it structures capital accumulation (Fine 269).

The latter dynamic determines land use: if rents are too high, land use is abandoned:

"capital is not compelled to move onto particular lands... [unless] corresponding surplus profits can be produced and paid as rent given the market value formed" (256). For the purposes of this dissertation, however, Harvey's argument demonstrates that land-use is embedded in capitalist social and spatial relations.

To summarize, land use-values are structured by capital's constant pressure to achieve average profit levels by subordinating land to factory-style efficiencies. Rents provide important signals for capital to innovate and for new land uses, particularly in urban spaces. As long as locational, social and technological advantages persist, the resulting surplus is appropriated as rent. AR and monopoly rent arise because of barriers to the flow of capital onto new lands, whereas UA usually has to compete with different uses on existing lands (except in the case of a scenario like Detroit, where urban land has been abandoned.) Therefore differential rent is far more important for contemporary UA.

In particular circumstances, UA has the potential to succeed as capitalist enterprise with sufficient subsidies and intensive application of capital. However, when set up solely to create use-values, UA is bounded by pressures to obtain rent. As soon as land values go up, so will potential differential rents and non-market UA faces pressure from profitable land uses. This presents a fundamental challenge to the localist theory that alternative production and distribution networks can distribute use-values.

Pro-market urban agriculture

Harvey argues that "we can, in principle at least, investigate each of the multitude

140 of different activities within capitalism, seek to discover the rational basis of each and the locational principles that guide them, and so establish the basis for rental payments in different lines of activity" (340). The rational basis for agriculture is capital accumulation; however, unlike rural agriculture, UArent is not just determined from better-than-worst-quality agricultural land, but from all urban land uses. Its main advantage over large-scale agribusiness is its proximity to sites of consumption, which reduces transport costs. "Distance, with its implicit differential labour times embodied in the costs of transport, is the one hard basis for an adequate theory of urban rent" (Murray

"Part One" 120). The establishment of UA is challenged on the one hand by capital's technological innovations in transport to reduce the space between production and consumption, and on the other by capital's levying and appropriation of higher rents on any surplus profits arising from transport savings. This insight is not lost on pro-market

UA. For example, Small Plot Intensity (SPIN) farming lowers transport costs by

"locating [urban farms] close to markets, [so that] farmers can direct market, which eliminates the middleman and allows a farmer to keep 100 percent of his/her sales."

Practitioners recognize the law of value applies to agriculture like any industry: "Labor is the single biggest expense in any farm operation, so SPIN farmers aim to minimize or even eliminate the need for outside labor", by relying on free work from family and friend networks. Although SPIN farmers operate according to "sound economic and environmental practices", nonetheless it "is entirely market-driven", allowing "you [to] run your farming operation like any other type of small business" according to consumer demand (SPIN FAQs 2). It uses technologies such as intensive cropping and redesigned

141 greenhouses to produce as much food in a single acre greenhouse as a 20 acre one

("Feeding The City" 20). These include secondary processing facilities that recycle solid, water and energy wastes (21). Growing Power, based in Milwaukee and Chicago, run greenhouses that grow crops and livestock, prepare and sell food and create compost from local producer and restaurant waste (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 175).

This suggests that, while centralization in agriculture continues, there is some space for niche production. While middle-sized farms in the U.S. have been decreasing, the number of small farms has risen by around 17 percent between 1982 and 2007.

However, this is a marginal phenomenon, as only two percent of farmland is cultivated by farms of 50 acres or less, and there is no information on whether these are urban or rural farms. Meanwhile farms over 1,000 acres, which cultivate two thirds of agricultural land, are also growing (Key and Roberts). Finally, capital uses technology to reduce the distance between production and consumption, and it is cheaper to speed up transport than to relocate production processes (Harvey "Limits" 379) If higher rents can be generated elsewhere, urban farms will not be able to compete and zoning will be vigorously resisted.

The Markham Foodbelt

One example of preferential zoning is a foodbelt: land in or near city boundaries reserved for food production. City councillors in Markham, a municipality north of

Toronto, tried to preserve 40 percent of its remaining land for agriculture and wilderness

(Gombu "Markham"). Their proposal claimed to protect agricultural jobs, promote local food, stop suburban sprawl and preserve the watershed (Protect Markham 22,23,28).

142 However, the York Region Federation of Agriculture did not support the development freeze, since higher land values would make renting farmland prohibitive.

Since the banks financing tenant farmers do not obtain benefits from capital improvements, they would not lower their rents if farmers raised the quality of their land, creating a disincentive to investment (Reynolds). This is the contradiction of owner- occupation that Mandel and Murray describe. In a particularly apt sentiment, one farmer denounced a development freeze by stating, "You are taking a free-market situation and you are legislating something on that land that's going to devalue the land. That's communism" (Hseih "Denounce"). If communism meant blocking market access, the farmers were correct: their demand to be able to sell their land should values rise expressed a desire to take advantage of rising differential rents on their plots. They denounced "artisanal products and agritourism" as an alternative, suggesting large-scale agriculture still generates higher rents than smaller-scale ventures. As one farmer put it,

"We are never going to be the lowest-cost crop producer, ever, in the world." Farmers depend on their closer location to markets to make up for higher agricultural rents available elsewhere, yet their "unique location... doesn't guarantee a profit" (Hseih).

The city councillor who proposed the freeze blamed "vested interests" on farmer opposition; meanwhile the food belt had 83 percent support among Markham residents

(Hseih; Hseih "Favour"). However, this may not be due entirely to enthusiasm for local produce: the anti-development campaign was also pitched for residents as explicitly anti- growth, warning about "damage to community values and existing property values", which suggests a level of parochialism (Protect Markham 10).

143 The foodbelt proponents fought capital centralization in a battle over DRII, pitting developers who could muster large credit reserves against farms that would yield lower rents. By treating land as a financial asset to generate above-average returns, in the form of land rights to build and sell new houses, exchange-based land-use was more profitable.

The entire agro-food sector in Markham generated $62 million revenues from 6,617 hectares of farmland in 2006, while developers paid $100 million for a single, 204- hectare farm in 2009. (Protect Markham 24; Yorkregion.com). Markham farms generated

$9,369 per hectare in 2006 for agriculture; the farm in question generated $490,196 per hectare for housing, generating differential rents 52 times higher than agricultural income. In urban areas, new homes are less profitable than the land they sit on, which creates most of their fictitious value. Capitalist producers will not upgrade facilities on land if any new profits will simply be siphoned off as rent; however, when landowners treat land as a pure financial asset, speculative capital will promote more intensive exploitation of the land. This can create an alliance between capitalist and landowner - or, in this case, between farmer and developer - seeking higher profits and rents respectively. In these scenarios, "enhanced rents far outweigh the profit to be had from direct investment", and the Food Belt initiative was defeated by a city council vote

(Harvey "Limits" 368; Gombu "Plan").

When necessary, the local state and capital can act together to ensure locational advantage and inexpensive reproductive spaces and resources (Murray "Part Two" 28).

However, as the state must manage the affairs of capital in general, it remains a contradictory instrument. The local state must respond to changes in use and the potential

144 for higher rents by granting planning permissions that reflect higher land values. The development industry has extensive lobbying power at all levels of government and is able to alter such fundamentals as tax policy to its benefit (O'Connor 84; Dupuis 3).

Finally, the state cannot risk invalidating the concept of private property on land by intervening in land markets too directly, as the farmers feared (Harvey "Limits" 371).

Reflecting these tensions, Markham was the only municipality in the region to even consider limiting growth.

Developers can even harness UA to their advantage. In Vancouver, developers were allowed to reclassify vacant lots from commercial to parkland usage, lowering their property taxes by 70 percent. In some cases developers planted a few trees on lots next to highways, while others created community gardens. Omni Developers saved over $2 million; one property worth $24 million had its tax cut by $357,000 per year. Prima

Properties Inc. saved $345,000 on another $24 million plot. Local non-profit, the

Vancouver Public Space Network, partnered with Prima to allocate the new community garden spaces, despite the fact that some of the properties held contaminated soil. The tax cuts were not lost to the city; rather, the losses were socialized to the rest of the taxpayers. According to one columnist, the subsidies to community gardens amounted to

$350 per tomato plant (Garr). One recent Vancouver development incorporated the existing community garden into the condo design (Springbank). Here the use-value of community gardens generated no rent from its produce; rather, it became a placeholder for other forms of capital.

These examples do not suggest that the enterprise that generates the highest rents

145 will win every battle over land use. Rather, rent structures these battles, bounding UA's possible use-values by the future capitalized rents of urban land markets. It appears that in particular circumstances, small-scale UA can generate sufficient rents to become a viable enterprise, particularly with state support. However, the rents generated by other uses, either large-scale industrial agriculture or real estate speculation, limit the prospects for UA. These limits are particularly acute when use-value-focused UA is proposed.

Anti-market urban agriculture

Community gardening provides a model to examine anti-market, use-value UA. It involves local residents and activists collectively producing food from urban plots of land. Administrative support includes private and non-profit partnerships with municipal agencies to encourage new zoning, resource-sharing and education ("Feeding The City"

20). UA uses land more intensively, grows more diverse products, recycles bio-waste and lowers energy usage and carbon emissions as it reduces transport times (Friendly 7).

Farmers' markets, buyers' coops, community kitchens and other distribution methods provide a basis for community organizing and networking, while improving healthy food consumption, physical exercise, education, job skills, income for gardeners and community safety (27). They can also be incubators for other initiatives like social clubs, creating an enhanced sense of well-being for participants (43).

The implications are grand: even a relatively passive form of participation, like shopping at a farmers' market, "begins to build a different reality, one that uses less oil...

[and] responds to all the parts of who we are" (McKibben 128). UA shares the skills of new and migrant gardeners to "rebuild human communities with the garden serving as a

146 focal point and shared mission" (Carrlson 87). In doing so, gardening "requires you to live with a stronger sense of community in mind... [and] shed a certain amount of your hyper-individualism and replace it with a certain amount of neighborliness. It doesn't require that you join a commune or become a socialist" (McKibben 105). Despite this disavowal of socialism, Carrlson sees a political purpose that McKibben does not: gardening is not simply a hobby, but a strategy of "gardeners [who] are working to refashion their lives in tune with their own visions, know-how, and multidimensionality"

(95). Carrlson also references Utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who promoted gardening as a form of "attractive labor." Community gardens reflect this value given the

"sociability, conviviality, pleasure, and beauty" they create (100). They are prefigurative of a postcapitalist society, encouraging collaboration, "sharing tools, land, knowledge, labor, customers, and money" in a democratic structure that addresses "the obstacles common to urban food production: land tenure, food security, and economic survival"

(Carlsson 102). Together the numerous groups working on these issues create a "cohesive food movement", the natural heir to the labour, women's and democracy movements.

Food politics transcends any one of its strands, creating "distinct but loose-fitting forms of collaboration that nurture, consume and honor food" (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 20).

In the U.S., urban gardens were implemented on a massive scale in The first

World War with government support: "five million gardeners produced $520 million worth of food in 1918." The U.S. government promoted gardening during the Depression for self-sufficiency. In the Second World War, 18 to 20 million families planted "Victory

Gardens" and grew 40 percent of U.S. vegetables (Carrlson 82, 83). These declined as

147 post-war incomes increased and agriculture industrialized. Garden spaces arose with municipal bankruptcies in the 1970s, when the number of vacant lots increased (88). With the extra land, aided by federal financial support, 200,000 urban residents consumed produce from community gardens by 1980. $17 million worth of produce was grown in

1982. However, funding for community gardens was capped under President Reagan and ended entirely in 1992 (87). Some government-supported local food programs continue, but many garden advocates have turned to private or municipal funds. The New York

Housing Authority began a gardening program in 1962, which today administers 572 registered gardens. Chicago and Vancouver both have numerous community gardens on roofs and sites owned by social housing projects (Friendly 36). 100 community gardens have been created on public housing land in Toronto, creating $300,000 total value annually (41) ("Food and Hunger" 32).19 Its relative decline over the twentieth century suggests that anti-market UA only becomes the focus of government policy when regular market provision of agricultural commodities is limited by a crisis, such as war or recession.

The poor lack Community Food Security (CFS), defined as access to healthy food through broad, participatory structures that encourage social justice (Friendly 22). Poor people pay 30 percent of their disposable income for food, more than double the average, and live in 'food deserts', neighbourhoods where supermarkets are not geographically accessible (Friendly 8) ("Food Retail Access" 10). Community gardens are supposed to provide a means to achieve CFS, because poor people can use their own labour in

19 These are only a sample of existing community garden projects; for more details see Roberts (2008), Food and Hunger Action Committee (2003); for the Global South see Veenhuizen ed. (2006).

148 kitchens to learn skills. For UA advocates, community gardens, kitchens and markets should be generalized to include "food issues in community planning - in government purchasing of local foods, business zoning to make quality food stores available to all, and food projects as part of school curriculum" (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 53). This is seen in an overall policy context, addressing not simply hunger but food production as a whole. In Toronto, CFS has been promoted by the Toronto Food Policy Council, created to envision an overall municipal plan for food security and focusing heavily on UA

(Friendly 32). The usual use-values of gardening apply: practitioners achieve an unalienated connection with others through unpaid volunteer farm labour, part of "giving the poor 'a hand up rather than a hand-out'" (Roberts "No-Nonsense" 64). The Food And

Hunger Action Committee advocates for food security by claiming, "As one example of the real difference community gardens can make, a homeless man fed himself for the last two summers from his plot in the Moss Park Community Garden" ("Tending The

Garden" 11). In New York state, low-income community gardens provide four times more "social capital" for participants than gardens in wealthier areas. Public health authorities have conducted studies showing positive health outcomes for a range of food security programs (34).

However, these kinds of micro assessments of UA are all that are available: there are no substantive impact studies beyond anecdotal evidence (Friendly 27; 33). The complexity of factors contributing to health - diet, food access, housing employment, etc.

- makes it difficult for a community group to measure success or failure. Distribution measures face market limitations on food costs and land values. In Toronto, almost all

149 farmers' markets are located outside of poor neighbourhoods (Friendly 46). "Good Food

Box" programs provide healthy produce to people in food deserts; however, they face the same higher-cost barriers as all alternative distribution systems. The programs have declined considerably in social housing, due to both being associated with rent collection and the high price of produce for people on fixed incomes. Although early data suggested

70 percent of Food Box consumers were low income, the poorest are excluded (45).

Despite their lower mark-up than supermarkets and not-for-profit status, small markets still require subsidies by FoodShare, a Toronto-based NGO, since "the resources necessary to run a market are huge" (48). In the U.S., those markets that have sustained themselves successfully have relied on public subsidies, including coupons presented to low-income consumers with the associated stigma (28). Poor consumers cannot pay the higher prices demanded by small-scale producers, which is a fundamental contradiction for farmers' markets that are supposed to provide CFS. An alternative would be nationalizing food production and supermarkets and setting price controls, but that would interfere with property rights. Rather, in an echo of Proudhon's market justice, UA advocates want to make the market more accessible: provide poor people with ways to grow food and learn new skills.

Access alone cannot overcome systemic barriers. UA advocates are aware of structural poverty issues, citing the 21 percent cut in Ontario's social assistance in 1995, and since raised by only 3 percent ("Tending The Garden" 20). However, localists pose demands for income support alongside community garden initiatives as if they can provide similar benefits. Actual government support for CFS is meagre. Funding for

150 initiatives is often on a once-only, individual project basis ("Food Retail Access" 20). In

Toronto, the Food and Hunger Action Fund was approved for a single year in 2002, granting $750,000 of provincial money to assist poor communities. Even that amount was only two thirds of what was requested ("Tending The Garden" 8). This is not to deny the good intentions and innovative plans by UA advocates to provide resources and education for poor people about food security. However, it suggests that the scale of the problem cannot be addressed by food security measures alone.

Food security is as an effect of income security, and UA measures to provide CFS cannot address structural issues like poverty. In the only study to examine the impact of localist UA, one third of low-income households in Toronto families were deemed food insecure and over a quarter were severely food insecure. Yet participation in emergency programs was not very high. Only 20 percent used food banks and one third used public children's nutrition programs. It was far more popular to delay paying bills and rent to afford food. The study "found no indications that the use of food banks or children's food programs had any bearing on household food security status." The use of community gardens and kitchens by this group was "so low that we could not even analyze the relationship between community garden or kitchen participation and household food insecurity", despite participant access to these programs (Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 138).

This makes sense, as local food requires huge amounts of resources to be used properly:

Food that is closer to the post-harvest, instead of pre-eating stage, usually

(but not always), requires more preparation time and skill... Shopping,

selecting, purchasing, transporting more bulk, washing, chopping,

151 preparing, serving, cleaning up cooking dishes... preparing soils,

cultivating, harvesting, storing, and preserving engages many monetary

and particularly non-monetary costs... [including] time, knowledge,

technological aids, space for storage or gardening, etc (Bellows and

Hamm 276).

Workers - particularly from poor, minority groups - are supposed to spend more time sourcing ingredients and cooking to compensate for their prepared, processed, non­ local food (Kingsolver 91). Yet poor people are the least likely to have access to the money, time, vehicles and tools necessary to make local food consumption a viable part of their lifestyle. This is demonstrated across Canada, as the participation of low-income households in food charity programs nationally is also low.

Local food programs increase the amount of unpaid household labour necessary for household reproduction, yet "the perception that these programs play a valuable role in addressing the unmet food needs of food-insecure children and/or households persists"

(Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk 138). In their defence, Friendly suggests that CFS programs

"are measured against a vast set of systemic roots of food insecurity, which no isolated local program alone can counteract" (24). However, Kirkpatrick and Tarasuk suggest that the policy is insidious, allowing governments to provide occasional funding to community gardens and claim to be addressing food security rather than creating policy to address income insecurity (135). Even Roberts admits that farmers' markets are ways for governments to save money and avoid "direct provision of food to people who are hungry" ("No-Nonsense" 98). Creating formal policy would mean moving from

152 grassroots projects like gardens and kitchens to policy measures to far-reaching income security measures like raising the minimum wage, negating the liberatory impulses radical gardeners assign to UA and localism as a whole.

Rent and anti-market urban agriculture

Community gardeners justify the use of space by citing the social, economic and health benefits for the gardeners themselves (Friendly 38). However, improving the neighbourhood raises land values, which means sustaining urban gardens can lead to their own demolition. As Carrlson cautions, "[g]ardening programs that don't confront private land ownership, at least for their own permanence, are sowing the seeds of their own destruction" (105). How a community garden can "confront private land ownership", a task traditionally undertaken by left-wing social movements and governments, is not revealed. Gardens are still part of the market and must deal with property rights and infrastructure provision. "Urban gardens need nurturance from cheap land costs and/or grants and donations from private foundations or government agencies" (104).

Community gardens must either be insulated from the law of value or they must generate sufficient rents: otherwise they will commodified.

Even if gardening is meant as a survival strategy for those without employment or nutritious food, it will not escape this dynamic. For example, over 900 community gardens in Detroit affiliate to the Detroit Agriculture Network, a non-profit dedicated to localist UA. Gardens are mostly under a quarter of an acre in size and grow produce for use, not exchange (Whitford). The Network partners with the local university and hundreds of individuals and organizations to provide resources like seeds, plants and

153 education through its Garden Resource Program (Detroit Agriculture Network). Non­ profit corporation Urban Farming prepares land for gardens and plans to create 1500 gardens per year in Detroit and elsewhere (McKee and Ortolani). Relying on volunteer labour, it cites health, job creation and education as benefits, including feeding 300,000 people (Urban Farming). Community groups are involved in reclaiming existing parks and vacant lots and preparing them for gardens, with the stated benefits of urban farming: security, healthy produce and building community (Greening of Detroit). At least one group incorporates anti-racism into their urban farm, addressing the African-American majority of Detroit's residents who lack access to healthy food (DBCFSN).

However, Hantz's example in Detroit has alarmed CFS advocates who fear the

"corporate takeover" of the UA movement by an unscrupulous operator (Hantz has paid over $1 million in fines for financial impropriety over the past five years) (Whitford).

Later phases apparently include expanding the farm to 20,000 acres to grow non-food crops like Christmas trees, which would either directly replace use-value UA or raise the value of its land and create rent pressures. One critic details a presentation by a Hantz representative who allegedly "talked in broad, moral terms about 'creating' a legacy for

Detroit. I asked him, 'Wouldn't your legacy be more positive if you helped create 2,000 ten acre farms with community ownership than a 20,000 acre plantation?' He was silent to this question" (Maynard). Hantz's response has been to deny there is any land grab

(Whitford). No absolute rent can be gained if the land does not have a value, and at the moment urban Detroit represents Marx's Australian outback, where capital is unable to monopolize the means of production ("Capital Volume One" 933). By encouraging

154 scarcity and applying capital, Hantz is attempting to create permanent improvements to the land and the basis for differential rent. Centralizing capital will steal techniques from, and try to supplant, local use-value UA.

The South Central Urban Farm provides a useful example of how finely attuned the market is to differential rent. In 1986, the Los Angeles municipality appropriated a

14-acre lot from owner Ralph Horowitz in order to build an incinerator. An activist group, Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, successfully fought its construction. After transferring ownership to different city departments, and regular legal challenges to the forced sale by Horowitz, the LA Regional Food Bank was granted a temporary use permit for the land in 1994. Mexican and Central American immigrants began cultivating small plots, setting up a democratic land-use decision-making process.

In 2003, Horowitz sued again to regain ownership and, in an allegedly non-transparent process, he was offered the property for $5 million (Hoffman). Eviction notices began to be served on the farmers in 2004, leading to vigils and round-the-clock occupation of the farm. With help from the national non-profit Annenberg Foundation and celebrity endorsements, the South Central Farm raised $16 million to meet Horowitz's asking price. After an initial endorsement, Horowitz requested two million more and finally refused the deal, citing ongoing maintenance costs and allegations of anti-Semitism: "If the farmers got a donation and said, 'We got $50 million, would you sell it to us?' I would say no... It's not about the money." His ire was raised by "the activists, the movie stars, the anarchists and the hard-nosed group - the ones I disliked from the beginning."

Equally importantly, however, was his concern for rent, and the fact that the squatters

155 would not compensate him for land that had appreciated in value (Becerra et al.). Within the farmers' movement, some also opposed granting the farmers' tenure, fearing permanent appropriation would dissuade other landowners from issuing temporary land- use permits in the future (Hoffman).

Horowitz was happy to provide other use-values if they could be capitalized further, claiming that "[m]y plans are market-driven... we're going to determine what the viable use is depending on the market conditions... If someone was in need of a manufacturing plant or a warehouse, we'd do that for them" (Hoffman). What the land produces is irrelevant to the capitalist: what matters is finding the opportunity to apply larger amounts of capital and generate higher differential rents. This understanding split the movement, since Concerned Citizens respected future rent-seeking while the celebrities and anarchists did not. These conflicts emerge when localists attempt to commodity positive benefits of land-use.

For example, the obvious environmental degradation that comes from urban development - concrete coverage of watersheds and the resulting water pollution from run-off - may be one of the factors that gets capitalized into future rents by far-sighted city governments. However, valuing externalities is a difficult proposition when budgets are calculated on a yearly basis and ecological changes often have no immediate impact on human health. When farms produce use-values like carbon-storage, water purification and animal habitats, the benefits can be quantified: "if high-quality river water lowers city costs for water filtration by a million dollars a year, local farmers can profitably be paid a million dollars a year for on-farm measures protecting water quality." Poor farmers

156 generate an estimated $3 trillion per year of services to the global ecosphere, and the

World Bank itself suggests paying for environmental services provided by land (Roberts

"No-Nonsense" 139,154). However, there is nothing profitable about externalities.

Capitalist firms cannot pay for use-values that do not generate surplus value or lower their costs. It is not a policy oversight that no one is paying farmers a million dollars yearly for environmental services. Commodifying land would actually increase differential rents available to property-holders by marketising previously free externalities. Preserving land would lead to massive estates of landowners with attendant property speculation. Poor people who need food security would be deprived of even more income, since government would have to raise taxes to pay for these new rents. The only way to make environmental services truly 'free' would be for government to expropriate the land, as in Cuba, which would call into question property rights as a whole.

Consumer activism

Localists recognize that capitalist agriculture works by refusing to pay for use- values: "[rjaising food without polluting the field or the product will always cost more than the conventional mode that externalises costs to taxpayers and the future." However, the problem of organic food is its perception "as an elite privilege." Consumers may be able to pay more, but their "highest food-shopping priority is the lowest price." This is called a "psychological gap between what consumers could pay, and what we will"

(Kingsolver 115). The problem is that if ethical, small-scale, UA is just a consumer preference, then consumers can equally choose not to participate. The exchange-value of

157 capitalism conflicts with the use-values of nutrition; despite localists' awareness of the power of capital to dictate what gets produced, consumers are supposed to transcend that power, leading to the litany of contradictions addressed in Chapter Two.

From 1999 to 2009, UK spending on ethical products rose from £13.5 billion to

£43.2 billion. Clearly, consumers with disposable income can consume ethically.

However, they are still bounded by the market. The effect of the 2008 recession was ambiguous: on the one hand Fair Trade spending continued its record, 10 year growth from £22 million to £749 million. The overall ethical goods market increased 18 percent despite the recession. However, organic food sales suffered: after peaking at 2 percent of total sales, by August 2008, within a few months of the onset of recession, UK organic produce sales had slowed and even shrank for some commodities, dropping from a peak of £100 million per month to £81 million (Jowit "Shoppers"). Organic food sales peaked at two percent of total sales, while food prices as a whole went up 10 percent (Wood).

Overall sales volume fell in 2008, with a 19 percent drop in the first three months of

2009. Eight farmers were dropping the organic certification every week due to falling sales and rising feed prices (Jowitt "As UK"). It was not, as farmers and environmentalists hoped, a blip: a year into the recession, "three in every five shoppers

(69 percent) say they plan to continue cutting back on organic food after the downturn.

Two-thirds (61 percent) claim they will seek to pay less for ethically sourced foods, such as Fairtrade, when the downturn ends." Discount supermarkets were the main beneficiaries of shoppers' loyalties (Smithers). Ethical brands suffered too, as sales of battery hens increased during the recession while free-range brands fell (Fearnley-

158 Whittingsall). As the head of a consumer survey put it, "The recession has shaken off the moral veneer of consumers" (Smithers). The market places limits on how ecological an economic system can be, if there are no buyers for what is produced.

Following neoclassical precepts, localism treats government as simply a larger consumer able to meet the premium prices that individuals cannot. McKibben argues that, given the size of agribusiness subsidies, "there is plenty of 'public' money to radically decentralize food production, even in the United States. Farmer's markets could be built in every community and big city neighbourhood, while farmers could be subsidized to grow food in ways that protect land and water, and preserve open space" (107). City- based agencies are supposed to pool their resources spent on food at all municipal services, like child nutrition programs and seniors centres ("Phase II" 38).

As Chapter Two showed, subsidies are not based on the relative technical merits of small or large production but are a function of local government's role in "managing social and economic conflict between and within economic classes" (O'Connor 87). This analysis also applies to funding for UA. Public institutions are not outside the market: large-scale programs that attempt to set up new markets must still interact with existing ones. This usually requires the intervention of state subsidies, which have been necessary to create UA initiatives or preserve existing agriculture within local boundaries. Subsidies

20 The contradictions of consumer activism apply even to militant producer networks. The Movement for Landless Peasants (MST) in Brazil, which squats vacant land and pushes for land reform, must still cope with the centralized power of capitalist distribution networks. MST cooperative farms have trouble meeting the standardized products demanded by supermarkets. The distributors also double the price, whereas the cooperative could sell it for less and still profit. But even though there "are plans for direct sales of food... 'it's hard to make people so interested, because although people should know where their food comes from, many don't care" (Patel 209). Even in the radical spaces created by the MST, consumer education is still seen as a means to overcome the existing distribution networks.

159 can "placate small-scale capital adversely affected by corporate-oriented urban renewal programs." However, these payments tend to benefit larger, rather than smaller enterprise, particularly in agriculture (169). Subsidies for UA exist: for example, Seattle launched a $400,000 marketing campaign to encourage restaurants to buy local ("Feeding

The City" 15). Buffalo NY set up Village Farms, an aquatic and greenhouse complex downtown. The city purchased the land at $11,000 per acre, paid $860,000 to clean the soil and reduced tax and electricity charges for the enterprise (9). While this demonstrates subsidies going to local business rather than corporate farms, it shows how much municipal funding is needed by UA initiatives.

Partial funding from private institutions, to create market access rather than subsidization, is more likely: Local Food Plus (LFP), a Toronto-based NGO, follows this model by "identifying purchasers who will pay a premium to support [sustainable] local food systems" ("How"). LFP set up a partnership between the University of Toronto and

"local and sustainable" food service companies. LFP "certifies farmers and processors who actively support local purchases and sales, animal and farm worker wellbeing, energy-efficient practices, safe pesticides... [and] biodiversity" (Roberts "No-Nonsense"

157). Another example includes the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, which hired a community organizer from 2005-2008 to outreach to its tenants to set up community gardens, community kitchens and fresh produce markets (Friendly 43). While these are worthy initiatives, they are notable for the minimum expenditure they require of publicly funded institutions, and support the specific constituencies their organizations serve: students and low-income tenants. It is hard to see how this model could be

160 generalizable outside institutions willing to shield small producers from the law of value.

The market sets the outer limit on subsidies. For example, during the last recession the market for recycled material disappeared. In "three weeks in October

[2009], the price of paper went from $200 to $20 a ton, corrugated cardboard dropped from $250 a ton in August to $100 in December." Small recyclers, who usually export their products to China for processing, were driven out of business (Glaister). In China, it was predicted that millions of recycling workers would lose their jobs (Branigan). In

North America, local government programs that ran at a profit made losses instead.

Berkeley, the first city to implement curbside recycling, planned to charge homeowners extra for collections (Streit). When government funding is unavailable, consumer power is limited.

Rent as resistance?

Kovel suggests there are anti-capitalist elements to organic farming's relationship with the land, as it seeks to augment natural processes rather than replace them: for example, using beneficial insects rather than chemicals for pest control. This sensitivity to natural systems creates smallness and complexity, adapting to landscapes rather than imposing homogeneity. UA may indeed be what he calls a "highly developed social production" marked by the enthusiasm of its practitioners. However, the drive to achieve

SNALT and generate rents operates outside this commitment and sets outer limits to market share. Kovel predicts that "the market, that is, capital, will simply adulterate, and finally expropriate the organic farm, enclosing yet another bit of the Commons. This is unhappily already well underway" (173). While Kovel calls for struggle to challenge and

161 restrict the profit imperatives of the global market, the local food movement itself does not strategize confrontation with capital's power.

Some CFS advocates see the need to transcend the local as a realm for food security, recognizing that small business and activist DIY cannot substitute in breadth or depth for state-led anti-poverty measures. They demand that food policy and food systems planning should be integrated into urban policy as a whole (Friendly 31). Since

"the absolute cost of CFS programs appears negligible compared with the overall expenditures in building upgrades and upkeep in social housing," UA could be a first step towards the broader goal of income security (50).

The more radical localists propose small projects that are supposed to agglomerate and overcome the capitalist food system. This subversion is not anti- capitalist but non-capitalist. Rather than wasting time on ideological social struggles, it is claimed that UA can develop local knowledge, undermine capitalism and, eventually, allow participants to separate themselves completely (Carrlson 84,103). Urban gardeners celebrate their status outside the capital-labour relation: "their economy is predicated on traditional finance, sweat equity, barter, and non-monetary sources of wealth such as networks, good will, generosity... through a 'traditional' economy and through a radically decommodified gift economy" (98). De-industrialized cities grant an advantage to urban gardening: in "the practical work of clearing vacant lots and planting and nurturing gardens, a different kind of working class emerges, independent and self-sufficient, improvisational and innovate, convivial and cooperative, very often led and organized by females" (89).

162 Developing this criticism, Katz suggests rent theory adheres too strictly to capital logic, granting capital, and not workers, power to shape production and distribution relations (72). When "workers struggle to impose their own price on shelter and space, and their own meanings on land; when they refuse to permit their spaces to be used for the reproduction of capital; and when they struggle collectively to define their communities and cities as self-organized spatial use-values, these are forms of the struggle for 'workers' rent'" (75). If non-market reproduction is freeing, then a determinist reading of rent theory cuts off UA's possibility of resistance.

However, while volunteer labour, the gift economy and organic farms may provide new bases for organizing, there is no outside to capital. Workers cannot refuse to reproduce capital: their existence as workers means pursuing non-market production and reproduction saves capital the cost of providing those services themselves and helps fix segments of the working class to particular spaces (Gough and Eisenschitz 183; Harvey

"Limits" 384). Mann sees the process as a temporary obstacle to the law of value:

"nonwage forms of production continue to exist, not because they are preferred avenues of capital accumulation, but because ... they cannot be conquered by capitalist production at this point in time." Theories focusing on resistance by nonwage labour do not challenge the dynamics that exploit and displace workers in the first place (Mann 19, 33).

In The Housing Question, Engels warned that if workers successfully lowered the costs of reproduction - for example, through rent control - capitalists would simply lower wages in response:

all so-called social reforms which aim at saving or cheapening the means

163 of subsistence of the worker... [e]ither... become general and then they are

followed by a corresponding reduction of wages, or they remain quite

isolated experiments, and then their very existence as isolated exceptions

proves that their realisation on a general scale is incompatible with the

existing capitalist mode of production (Chapter Two).

Edel and Katz are critical of Engels' position, suggesting that "isolated exceptions" can still have an impact: non-market reproduction prevents workers from having to sell their labour power to the lowest bidder, allowing them to hold out for higher wages (Edel 7). If their labour power is devalued, as Engels warns, then the organization formed through non-market reproduction can be a tool to resist that devaluation (Katz 76). However, since class struggle takes place on ground prepared by capital, the theoretical possibility of resistance must be judged against historical record.

In the last 30 years of neoliberalism, the working class has failed to maintain its share of the national wealth: "workers' rent" has tracked sharply downwards from its production values. Non-market reproduction may be a survival strategy, but this does not mark it as a viable political alternative.

UA is often suggested as a positive example of non-market reproduction.

Although Weis acknowledges that farm labour is precarious and physically taxing, he suggests that, if managed democratically, it could provide new use-values: if "agriculture is freed from the scorn of development theorizing, it has an unmatched potential to generate autonomous, skillful, experimental, healthy and meaningful work, or what might be understood as dignified labour" (335).

164 This scenario is debatable, for two reasons. First, capital in agriculture continues to centralize. As shown in Chapter Two, the purpose of machines is to remove humans from the labour process, lowering the value embodied in commodity-units.

Environmentally benign, large-scale farming would be far more expensive than present practices, although Hantz's DRII-intensive urban farm suggests that capital can create the necessary innovations to overcome the fetters of previous forms, finding ways to utilise heavy machinery in small spaces and taking advantage of cheap land. Ultimately, counterposing simple commodity production and exchange to a developed capitalist economy is a false logic. As Murray argues, "Any reforms couched in defiance of these laws - notably to establish a poorly capitalised, independent small farmer class as the backbone of productive agriculture, is already archaic and will be treated by history as such" ("Part Two" 29).

Second, it is the formal or real domination of capital, not development theorizing, which is responsible for debasing labour. If agricultural labour is a goal of anti-capitalist transformation, there seems to be very little transformative about it. There is an underlying ethical issue: why should people who are marginalized by virtue of their class be forced to work more just to achieve health? (Dachner) If large-scale industrial agriculture is to be ended, then machines will have to by replaced by human labour.

(Roberts "No Nonsense" 23,48) Weis claims there is nothing "essential about the nature of agrarian livelihoods," but it is unclear how the physical aspects of agricultural work, even in a post-scarcity society, do not impose severe strictures of physical effort and time. People should, of course, be free to choose intensive agricultural labour if they

165 wish, but a non-exploitative agriculture would free people from labour, not turn it into an ethos. Anticipating the critique, Weis derides those who would call "labour-intensive and knowledge-dispersed agricultural systems... backward-looking, hopelessly romanticized or simply implausible", claiming the critics in thrall to corporate agribusiness (337).

To agree that the existing inefficiencies and externalities are inherent to industrialism is to accept the binary logic that all large-scale development must be capitalist. Generations of socialists have struggled to appropriate and adapt technology to human use, not eliminate it. The necessary elisions - that peak oil will eliminate all oil before new fuel sources can be devised, that farm systems cannot adapt large-scale production to machinery running on other fuel sources, and that the only possible response is a de-, rather than a reindustrialization - take the social relations of capitalism for granted, succumbing to what White calls "a remarkably dreary ecology... [based on] structural determinism, pessimism and exhaustion" whose advocates are "happy to frame their political project in terms of the need to embrace austerity" (70).

Conclusion

If local products are grown for use, then they face rent pressures. If they do not generate profit, they can be replaced by property use that will. This relationship has even been institutionalized; for example, the UK government's Food 2030 program proposes temporary allotments for community gardens with leases that can be cancelled when land values increase (Vidal and Meikle). Capitalist social relations embed agriculture in the capital circuit, establishing the rule of SNALT and co-opting new, local forms of production and distribution. By centralizing land ownership, capital creates the financial

166 resources for credit, which allows the purchase of land and the generation of rent. Pro- market UA can produce for niche markets; however, it must generate significant DRII, since it is situated on urban land where rents are already higher. If it is successful, its advantage in transport cost-savings will be extracted from the landowner through higher bank mortgages. Capital can also create small-scale, DRII-intensive production strategies, as in the Hantz farm, or embed local production in vertically integrated commodity chains, as when large supermarket chains promote local food: Unilever, Loblaws and

Frito-Lay have all taken steps to market their massive agribusiness and distribution networks as local (Elton). This is the same model capital applies to all owner-occupiers, to get the farmer to assume the costs of production, upkeep and improvements.

The evidence for anti-market UA suggests that it cannot provide the use-values advocates claim for it, and the pressures to generate rent will supplant it as soon as higher revenues are available. To compensate, UA inevitably relies on consumers and government paying extra for locally-made goods. This is a weak subsidy to artificially maintain rents for UA and does not provide a basis for scaling up local production.

The UN's General Comment 12 provides hopeful guidelines to overcome rent pressures, directing governments to "respect" community gardens for providing green space, and for public use of space to outweigh private property rights (Roberts "No-

Nonsense" 97). However, without the despotic inroads on private property that Marx called for, these remain no more than micro-level directives with little social impact. To internalize all externalities, it would be necessary to democratically organize the economy to account for costs that are presently hidden and private. Marx thought that

167 only the collective organization of "associated producers" could ensure environmental stewardship ("Capital Volume Three" 216)

Roberts blames agricultural industrialism on global Modernism, defined loosely as an ideology emphasising progress and capitalist triumphalism ("No-Nonsense" 48).

However, it is too glib to dismiss all the technological advances capital developed to overcome barriers to production. Many of those same techniques could be put to better use, developing large-scale farming that does not deplete the soil. Although technical innovations pose the social contradictions of capital on a higher level, an economy that produces for human need could adopt some of these useful techniques.

Despite the limits of UA's attempt to create alternatives to agribusiness, localism continues to embody opposition to capital logic, and this poses strategic political questions. Why, if localism has so little impact apart from marginal projects, is it so popular? The answer lies in a complex mix of the pessimism, utopianism, and class relations of the localists themselves. In a word, localism is an ideology.

168 CHAPTER FOUR: THE IDEOLOGY OF LOCALISM

To understand localism's popularity, it is necessary to broaden the critique of political economy to include ideology. As a structuring set of ideas, ideology is the product of a class's strategies for reproduction, which are generalized to capitalist society as a whole. Not all localisms are petty bourgeois, and not every member of the petty bourgeoisie is a localist. However, there is a relation between the two. The petty bourgeois are distinguished by embodying both the sale and purchase of labour power.

This incessant calculation of worth creates a habitus reflected in localism's values of individual morality, community and voluntary simplicity. Localism promotes small lifestyle choices to effect large social changes, mirroring the individualized reproductive strategies of the class between capital and labour. This relationship leads localism both to utopianism and, when liberal optimism fails, its binary opposite, catastrophism. Localism attempts to make consumption a fundamentally moral act and to impose that morality on the personal choices of others. Its prominence is a product of petty bourgeois intellectual hegemony over social movements asserting the interests of the working class, not because the petty bourgeois have gained power in the neoliberal period but because the weight of the labour movement has declined.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell attacked the middle class socialists of the 1930s. He wanted to understand why, despite the inherent rationality of a democratically planned economy, socialism was becoming unpopular. He blamed the socialists themselves, "people of goodwill who quite honestly believe that they are working for the overthrow of class-distinctions." Despite their goodwill, their politics

169 came from their class position and, more specifically, the class prejudice that sprung from it: an aversion to working class lifestyle from those a few rungs up the social ladder. The socialist "proposes to level the working class 'up' (up to his own standard) by means of hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry, etc" (142). Their lifestyle-promotion combined with the worst kind of snobbery and eccentricity based on separating from, not appealing to the vast majority of people. "The truth is that, to many people calling themselves

Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders" (157). These moralists are drawn "entirely from the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that", forming a "dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit- juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like blue-bottles to a dead cat." Their socialism was not emancipation but a "dictatorship of the prigs" (160).

Forms of socialism-from-above have a long history, including philanthropism, in which "[s]ocialism (or "freedom," or what-have-you) is to be handed down, in order to

Do the People Good, by the rich and powerful out of the kindness of their hearts"

(Draper "Two Souls"). Engels saw it in contractual terms: the rich and powerful could give a small portion of their income as charity, in order not to be confronted by the worst effects of capitalist degradation ("Conditions" 277). It followed that "the downtrodden poor must above all avoid getting rambunctious, and no nonsense about class struggle or self- emancipation." (Draper "Two Souls") This form of elitism focuses on poor people's behaviour, rather than the systems of exploitation their labour reproduces and is

170 entirely compatible with a class-based prejudice against "rambunctious" lifestylism. For example, Kingsolver suggests that poor people can also take advantage of the benefits of healthy food, providing they change their "attitude" to exercise "patience and a pinch of restraint - virtues that are hardly properties of the wealthy" (31). Hygiene and poetry have been replaced by Do-It-Yourself, but the high-mindedness of patience and restraint remains. Orwell recalled a Communist speaker who spoke of London "Society dames

[who] now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-lessons to the wives of the unemployed.... First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money" (90). The reason lifestyle and attitude have become the focus for localism lies in ideology.

Ideology and Social Class

"The single individual, who derives [ideas] through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity" (Marx

"Eighteenth Brumaire" 421). They do not; rather, ideas are shaped by "the perspectives and the limits of variation of men's ideas in different historical classes, by the relations and forces of production in which they live" (Therborn "Science" 407). A critique of ideology "seeks to inhabit the experience of the subject from inside, in order to elicit those 'valid' features of the experience which point beyond the subject's present condition" (Eagleton "Ideology" xxiii). However, a direct link cannot be drawn between an individual's role in the social division of labour and the ideas in her head. This would be to submit to an overdetermining sense of ideology, which suggests that ideas and

171 actions are "essentially prefigured, predicted and controlled by a pre-existing external

force" (Williams "Base" 33). To explain ideology, it is necessary to first explain the

nature of the social division of labour and the control it exerts over ideas.

Williams describes capitalist social organization as having "a specific structure...

[whose] principles... can be seen as directly related to certain social intentions... which

in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class" (36). Naturalized ideas are

the expression of that class's domination, but how those ideas express a class's relation to

the division of labour is not straightforward. For

[s]ocial classes do not manifest ideologies in the way that individuals

display a particular style of walking: ideology is, rather, a complex,

conflictive field of meaning, in which some themes will be closely tied to

the experience of particular classes, while others will be more 'free

floating', tugged now this way and now that in the struggle between

contending powers. Ideology is a realm of contestation and negotiation...

there is no neat, one-to-one correspondence between classes and

ideologies (Eagleton "Ideology" 102).

To accept the warning that ideology does not map directly onto class position is

not to deny their relation altogether. Either extreme - linking ideas directly to the economic base, or granting human feelings and thoughts complete autonomy from their society - does not approach reality in its complexity. Class expresses a relation to, not a

position in the mode of production, and therefore the social division of labour does not

dictate a person's actions. Rather, the "real social and economic relationships contain...

172 fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore [are] always in a state of dynamic process" (Williams "Base" 34). Historical factors and social context "set... limits [and] exert... pressures" rather than dictate behaviour (33). No social forms are permanent, and their constant transformation forms individual moments of a totality that does not erase the individuality of the categories contained within it. Therefore "[c]lasses are certainly for Marxism historical agents: but they are structural, material formations as well as 'intersubjective' entities, and the problem is how to think these two aspects of them together" (Eagleton 102). The mediation between the two becomes an object of study or, as Marx puts it,

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of

existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed

sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class

creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the

corresponding social relations ("Eighteenth Brumaire" 421).

The determining role of the "base" dictates the mechanism for exploitation but not its course or intellectual effects; people are "bearers" of productive relations, not products of them (Williams "Base" 33; Therborn "Science" 404). The gap between experience and perception is filled by people's activity: "between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce" (Bourdieu 467). For example,

Wright finds empirical evidence of the link between the influence of ideology and class:

173 as professionalization and control over one's work increases, so does support for capitalism. This is contextualized nationally; in the U.S., the lack of a working class political movement has led to a much higher rate of identification with capitalist values

(Wright "Comparative" 12). Thus while the "interests and experiences faced by the individual" create consciousness, this is mediated by the political actors that provide particular interpretations of people's activities (13).

It is possible to create a micro, nuanced and even psychological explanation of how an appropriation of reality takes place in a way that does not accurately reflect it.

Eagleton describes how "a limit to our conceptions" that does not change may indicate a material limit "built into our social life." Individual intellectual effort cannot change this, for our "social practices pose the obstacle to the very ideas which seek to explain them"

("Ideology" 105). Those practices form the basis of ideology.

Ideology's "structural connections" are not always clear: the "apparent facts at the surface are products of the reified appearance of the capitalist mode of production." To appropriate reality means both going beneath the surface to grasp the essence of social relations, and to understand why the essence must appear as those surface forms

(Jakubowski 101). However, if ideology operates at the surface, why does it retain such a stubborn hold on people's consciousness? I.I. Rubin shows how Marx and Engels understood the effect of capitalism firstly in its human, psychological form. The power of capital works through the human mind but begins in the objective, external alienation of the worker from her product. (10) Capital dominates the individual worker, separating her from everything that makes her human.

174 While Rubin provides a counterweight to idealist philosophy that places the source of ideas in the mind of the thinker, he risks minimizing the power of ideas to shape human behaviour at all, as even the simplest kind of labour is bound up with the thoughts of the labourer. Ideology's operation must be concretized in terms of how certain sets of ideas sustain capitalism. A materialist critique of ideology moves "from negating reality in the name of an ideal to seeking within reality itself the forces for further development and motion" (Jakubowski 57). Yet the nature of the "reality itself' remains to be determined. Moving to materialism from idealism means transferring the opposition between appearance and essence to social categories.

How commodity fetishism constructs ideology

To understand how an ideology arises from these material relations, we must understand how a reified appearance of capitalist social relations becomes a source of that ideology. According to Marx, relations between things stand in for relations between people: the "absence of direct regulation of the social process of production necessarily leads to the indirect regulation of the production process through the market, through the products of labor, through things" (Jakubowski 59). A series of material substitutions come to stand in for human relations.

Marx's most famous example of commodity fetishism is his question for bourgeois social scientists: in assuming that value and price are fixed, neutral categories, they never asked "why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of its product" (Marx "Capital

Volume One" 174). By dehistoricizing capitalist development, they took the surface

175 movement of commodities for reality, rather than seeing the social relations of exploitation that cause them. The bourgeoisie created ideology, a "false, partial consciousness to the extent that it does not locate its object within the concrete totality, and thus to the extent that it is not adequate to the whole reality" (Jakubowski 103).

Ideology can be described as the consequence of people's ideas when they are based on those substitutions. These beliefs "help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class specifically by distortion and dissimulation" (Eagleton "Ideology" 30).

What distinguishes capitalism from earlier forms of class rule is that this self- alienation becomes individualized, to the extent that production becomes socialized. In feudalism, dependence on social production hides direct relations of domination; in capitalism, the working class is separated from the means of production and forced to sell its labour power to survive. Social labour, a profoundly collective activity, is turned upside-down into an individual means of survival. As "the commodity form permeates every aspect of social life, taking the shape of a pervasive mechanization, quantification and dehumanization of human experience," it begins to determine the ideas that dominate capitalist society (98). A worker gets "the impression that he can only live alone", and that society arose from voluntary association "without realising that these individuals would not exist if it were not for society and that they are determined by society in the first place" (86). This is reinforced by the mode of distribution taking the shape of

"innumerable transactions among commodity producers", which disciplines behaviour that does not support those transactions (Jakubowski 24). People come to accept the rule of objects, and capitalist social relations as the motion of those objects, as normal. From

176 this condition, it follows that "[v]alue, money, and so on, are not considered as expressions of human relations 'tied' to things, but as the direct characteristics of the things themselves, characteristics which are 'directly intertwined' with the natural- technical characteristics of the things." Objects determine the social status and even psyche of their owners (Rubin 27,25). Commodity fetishism creates the basis for an ideological understanding of capitalist economics.

All "participants in production" share a fetish of technical characteristics and limits, losing sight of the social nature of capitalism and identifying "the material process of production with its social form, and the identification of the technical functions of things with their social functions" (28). Social laws appear natural. Particular positions within the division of labour develop their own, apparently autonomous laws that are artificially extended to all areas of inquiry (95). The more this specialized knowledge pretends to universality, the more it fails to understand not only the world as a whole, but its own place within it: for adherents of a particular social science, "their own premises become transcendental and incomprehensible to themselves. In the end, they cannot understand either the method or the principle of even their own concrete substratum of reality" (96). That does not stop them from trying to apply their ideas of reality as if they held true for everyone. However, they become "limited by the horizon of the capitalist economy" in different ways and attempt to construct reality according to their position within the social division of labour.

The emerging European capitalist class had to conduct a class struggle against the previous feudal forms, in the process unifying previously disparate places and social

177 forms into national markets. Yet as the bourgeoisie expanded capitalist social relations, it created a new revolutionary class, the proletariat. Having socialized the creation of wealth, the bourgeoisie had to maintain the private appropriation of that wealth, denying the working class the right to free association and combination in socialist parties and trade unions. Its universal discourse of rights and freedoms had to be limited to a formal political structure. Bourgeois ideology reflected that process: although the capitalists

"were the first to recognize the economy as a total process, operating under a unified set of laws... these laws appear to the bourgeoisie to be natural laws, which depend on the lack of consciousness of their participants" (Jakubowski 109).

The proletariat has nothing to sell but its labour-power; it is completely self- alienated and can only transcend its exploitation by ending it. In contrast, the bourgeoisie controls social production but its members exist individually within it. Its members are structurally prevented from understanding the system as a whole, since their social role depends on competing individually with each other as owners of commodities (112).

Their premises are, as Rubin claims, both transcendental and incomprehensible. If it fully recognized its historical role, the bourgeoisie would have to realize the chief obstacle to further historical development is itself (Lukacs 54).

However, trapped between these titanic forces is an intermediate class: the petty bourgeoisie. The nature of its ideas reflects its position in the division of labour, where its members embody both owning and labouring. This means that its politics are defined by eclecticism: there "are social classes such as the petty bourgeoisie - 'contradiction incarnate,' as Marx dubbed them - whose ideology is typically compounded of elements

178 drawn from the classes both above and below them" (Eagleton "Ideology" 101). These contradictory elements have a material basis.

The historical trajectory of the petty bourgeoisie

Marx predicted that capital centralization would encourage the growth of middle layers between workers and bourgeoisie. The shopkeepers, merchants and artisans dominant in nineteenth century England were displaced as large firms replaced small ones. The American petty bourgeois declined from a high of 40 percent of the population in the late nineteenth century to a low of 10 percent in the 1970s (Wright "Class Counts"

72, 74), before beginning to grow again. Two occupational categories, small-holding owners and self-employed professionals, declined and developed according to distinct national circumstances.

In 1970s Italy and France, traditional artisans survived by making high-cost goods that were unprofitable for large firms to produce, and by providing low-wage employment during recessions (Berger qtd. in Myles and Turegun 109). The growth of precarious contracted-out labour, the generational effect of older workers starting businesses, the rise of decentralized small manufacturing and the decline of full-time job creation led to the growth of small-holding in the U.S. (Wright "Class Counts" 77).

In the early twentieth century, the petty bourgeois who conducted technical and clerical work were replaced by or absorbed into large firms or government bureaucracies

(Harris 103). Capital's growing technical and organizational demands created the need for more research and education professionals. The technical administration of the welfare state, either in the public sector of social democratic countries like Sweden, or in

179 the private, non-profit welfare agencies in the U.S., increased the ranks of professionals, as did the size of corporate planning departments and the large number of supervisors in both the U.S. and Canada.

The transition of much of the labour force from small-scale artisanal production to research, planning and administration has been closely detailed in the post-Second World

War "postindustrial" literature (Myles and Turegun 114). Within Marxist theory, changes to the labour process provoked debate on the class nature of these new white collar occupations, which were called variously new workers, new middle classes or the professional-managerial class (Suh 112). Bourdieu characterizes a middle stratum composed of "junior executives and office workers, and... those who originate from the working class and have only moderate qualifications" (351). As workers trying to leave the working class by their own efforts, their ideologies and political outlook adopt a similar, individualized reproduction strategy to the self-employed. These "junior executives" closely parallel both the so-called creative class of young, urban workers in the sciences, high-tech and the arts, and the Nowtopians: "[gjrassroots biofuels boosters don't usually hail from the blue-collar parts of society. A lot of them are educators, computer workers, performers - a range of 'middle class' occupations.... [c]hoosing exodus from much of the work and trappings of 'middle class' success" (Peck

"Struggling" 757; Carrlson 175).

However, the concept of a middle layer remains analytically indistinct. Teachers and computer workers, ostensibly part of this layer, could work for large employers in factories or as independent consultants, encompassing very different relationships to the

180 mode of production. The small producers that Estill lauds (58) may be autonomous petty- commodity producers, but other professionals like teachers and nurses have formed the backbone of militant working class trade unions in Europe and North America (Harris

106). It "makes less sense to see a research scientist, a university professor, an industrial engineer or a social welfare counselor as having a petty-bourgeois character combining elements from the capitalist mode of production and simple commodity production"

(Wright "Class" 58). Professionals are often not self-employed but have surplus value extracted from their labour power, like all workers.

How to classify the petty bourgeois

This raises the difficulty of maintaining a Marxist theory of value-producing labour, with its exploiting and exploiter classes, in the midst of a vast, complex number of occupational categories, in which who works independently and who sells her labour power is not always evident (Wright "Classes" 54). Myles and Turegun approach the problem when they say "that occupational codes tell us little about what people actually do in their jobs" (115). However, the question is more fundamental, echoing Daly and

Farley's description of a consumer economy: there are simply too many variables to determine, with any empirical precision, what a middle class might be. A class structure becomes subject to revision with each new occupation created, and it becomes impossible to determine why certain strata carry more social or analytical weight than others. The result undermines Marxian class analysis as a whole: if worker and bourgeoisie are simply two classes among many, the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour that creates surplus-value is lost. This supports the numerous theories predicting

181 the end of the working class (Myles and Turegun 118) and Marxism as a whole.

Neo-Weberians moved the determination of class from the nature of production to income, mobility and job prestige (113). Since the latter factors changed drastically over the twentieth century, the distinction between bourgeois and proletarian was assumed to be historical, and the task became to identify the more complex layers that replaced the old petty bourgeois (Weil 7). These classifications proved potentially endless, according to whatever criteria the author deemed vital: social status, residence and family, technical prowess, intellectual work and others (Barbalet 563; Zussman 224; Stabile 46; Kivinen

60). None of these analyses considered class as a relation to the means of production; instead, they treated it as an ever-expanding, contradictory list of locations based on the use-values involved in professional categories. Intermediate class relations dissolved into incoherency and, along with them, any hope of ascribing a particular ideology to the petty bourgeoisie.

These studies demonstrated the limits of empirical observation without establishing a theoretical framework. They remain useful as forms of class anthropology, but illustrating the changing content of classes does little to explain their form. It would appear the Neo-Weberians were more influential than the

Marxists, because the latter absorbed the former's fixation on work roles rather than

•j t social relations of production.

21 If new classes have replaced bourgeois and proletarian, every theorist can make up his or her own. For example, Stabile uses two quotes from Marx about the growing role of supervisors and the importance of "scientific" labour to build a New Class of technicians (47). Because the technicians do not labour productively, they must be something qualitatively different: "Marx never specified the class he would have designated for them, but his framework provided methods for expanding on his fragmented insights into this special labor" (48). Stabile reads this New Class back into the feudal priesthood (50). Meanwhile,

182 It is true that social relations do not lend themselves to easy empirical observation, existing first as abstractions rather than as tangible phenomena.

However, when Marxists are criticized for constructing formalist structures rather than drawing on lived experience, this confuses concrete occupational status with these social relations. The capital-labour relation cannot be analytically accepted when useful and abandoned when it appears opaque: it either identifies how value is produced in capitalist society or it does not. For example, claiming that class "derives from an intricate web of social relations implicated in collective struggle, from which collective agents articulate their collective identity or interests in class terms, distinct from or sometimes antagonistic to others' interests" (Suh 114) does not describe how classes produce or appropriate value. Workers' class interests cannot be "sometimes antagonistic" to capital. Without "underlying and unifying concepts" it is impossible to analyze classes' strategic relationships and interests (Weil 4).

The impact of the move away from social class can be observed through Erik

Olin Wright's analysis, which stands as the most thorough attempt by a Marxist to define the petty bourgeoisie according to occupational criteria (Wright "Comparative"

3). Wright attempted to synthesize the two positions by creating a theory of contradictory class location, describing two broad layers: those who "are neither exploiters nor exploited", and their opposite, those who participate in relations of exploitation (5). The former category includes the self-employed or the "'old' middle

present-day academics are workers when they teach classes but members of the New Class when they conduct research (S3). Such historical leaps and hairpin turns are possible once occupational categories substitute for the capital-labour relation.

183 class". The latter are the professional or "'new' middle class... [who] lack assets in capital and yet are skill-exploiters" of other workers further down the hierarchy. Not owning, but still exploiting, puts them in a contradictory relation to both capital and labour ("Classes" 87). These characterizations allowed Wright to reapply Marxist categories: if capitalists and workers can be "defined by the nature of optimizing strategies given the specific kinds of assets they own/control" (91), so can those between them.

However, this did not resolve the problem of classification. Middle class professionals may be effectively exploited by their managers, but they also have a material interest in the high wages their firm pays them (96). Wright found that his model confused relations of exploitation with those of domination. The former implies a material interest in the subjugation of others, the latter simply expresses a relation of power. A lack of immediate domination and occupational autonomy does not denote membership in a higher class; for example, a janitor has far more immediate control over her work routine than an airline pilot but earns far less ("Comparative" 6).

To explain this contradiction, Wright made exploitation itself more complex, suggesting that some members of the middle class materially benefit from controlling the output, organization and skills of others. However, concealed in this complex model was a fundamental shift away from Marxism. Wright claimed that the middle strata, as both exploiters and exploited, are independent of other classes: they exist only through relations of market exchange to the bourgeoisie and proletariat, not as producers of value.

They have "isolated independence" (Weil 6). This was clearly not a class in the Marxist

184 sense of a relation to the means of production. It was a static definition, a group defined by the wage relation's absence.

In response, Weil argued that returning to the capital-labour relation provides the analytical rigour for the petty bourgeoisie to exist as a coherent class. The petty bourgeoisie has never been outside of capitalism; rather, it contains elements of both capital and labour. Capitalism separates workers from the means of production. However, the petty bourgeois "as capitalist, employs himself as wage-labourer." Marx saw them as a transitional point between the two poles (7); between exploited workers and exploiting capitalists, the petty bourgeois are both workers and owners, existing at a mid-point

"where petty bourgeois owners realize the full value of their own labor" (16).

This creates a contradiction: "the capitalist as such is only a function of capital, the labourer is a function of labour-power", and it would appear to be impossible to embody both. Marx's answer was to temporalize the contradiction: due to the growth of the division of labour, the petty bourgeois will either become a capitalist, exploiting the labour of others, or she will lose her property and become a wage-labourer (10). Marx did not say how long this process will take, or whether others will come to take the place of the petty bourgeois, just that individuals can embody the capital-labour contradiction.

"Thus before they hire anyone else, the petty bourgeois owners 'hire' themselves: they are, in effect, their own 'first' employees" (11). Self-employment is an arbitrary distinction: the petty bourgeois are defined by their function within the capitalist division of labour, not by the number of people involved. They appropriate their own surplus labour, which marks them as small capitalists. Even with the appropriation of their own

185 surplus labour, this does not provide enough income for the petty bourgeois to refuse work, and thus they remain participants in the labour process (12).

For example, the small farmer can produce her own means of production or purchase them from someone else, but as long as the farm produces commodities for the market, the means of production are used to generate capital. "[Capitalist exchange determines that all production comes to be valorized, regardless of any direct relation to the market", since the small owners buy and sell their own labour power (14). The petty bourgeois "simultaneously realize the full value of their labor and treat it capitalistically as wages and profits." For Marx, "commodity and labor value are both aspects of a single 'unity,' bearing the nature of each other even when

'formally' apart" (15). The existence of the market in commodities, and not the details of the labour process, define the relationship to the means of production.

This relatively simply explanation reveals the large number of problems involved in determining exploitation, and therefore class, using "the specific kind of assets" people own or control. For example, the new middle classes are often defined by owning skills; however, skill cannot be set outside the capital-labour relation. Skills are not solely personal possessions but transmitted through and embodied in networks of organization and technology. Intellectual property rights are possessed by corporations and rarely people. Skills are themselves small units of capital (18). The commodification of knowledge occurs along a continuum. If it is used for individuals alone, it is not capital, but as soon as it is alienated and used against them, it becomes capital.22 Skills provide

22 Weil qualifies his definition of skills by saying that "if knowledge is possessed in very small amounts

186 one way to demonstrate the dual nature of the petty bourgeoisie: "petty bourgeois ownership marks the point at which the two 'poles' of this relationship meet... where the amount of knowledge is sufficient to serve as capital and thus allow the appropriation of surplus-value, but not adequate to free its owner from the necessity of laboring personally." For example, the small farmer combines ownership and production of both the means of production and labour power, with which she produces surplus labour; the knowledge worker does the same, as the farmer's labour and ideas are both commodities

(19).23

Professional employees of firms also fit the classification. The firm exploits them, but their higher salaries allow them to appropriate the full value of their labour. It is their control over the means of mental labour, embodied in their own knowledge, which creates the internalization of the capital-labour relation: "[professional 'skill' is merely the level where knowledge as capital is united in the same person with the labor that utilizes it". This resolves the paradox of independent artisans pursuing accumulation more eagerly than "the salaried experts" of large firms: the latter embody more capital

(20). It is not the organization of the labour process in a large or small firm that is crucial to determining class, but the relationship to the means of production.

It may appear self-evident that when professional employees supervise or and individually" it remains the property of its single owner (19). However, he has just argued why small farmers are still exploiters, regardless of whether they make or purchase their means of production. In other words, the amount of knowledge, and how many people possess it, is immaterial; the social relations under which it is produced, used and transformed define it as capital. If this is so, the scale of knowledge- possession is irrelevant. This inconsistency, however, does not invalidate the broad argument. Weil neglects to mention the means of mental production that the small farmer depends on: the crucial knowledge of seasons, machine operation and maintenance, markets, mortgages, etc. Acknowledging these factors would strengthen his analysis.

187 collaborate with others, they are not appropriating their own mental labour. If this is the case, Wright's category of "exploiter and exploited" would still hold. However, Weil argues that, in practice, it is impossible to tell what portion of surplus value generated by the firm comes from the self-exploitation of professionals or their exploitation of those beneath them. Since surplus value "is only revealed imperfectly in the exchange process", and it is the firm as a whole that generates exchange-value in the market, the degree of self versus subordinate exploitation does not matter. The "purchased knowledge that has been 'fixed' in the mind... is the basis of the exploitation of surplus-value"; whether those minds are in charge or subordinate "is an 'operational' problem, not a conceptual one"

(24).24

There are other qualifications to examine, such as the role of de-skilling and skills transfer between generations (33-34). However, the Neo-Weberian classification has its own practical problems. For example, including both factory-floor supervisors and upper- level corporate managers in a middle layer groups together salaries of those earning

$50,000 and those earning millions (34 Footnote 29). More fundamentally, tracing exploitation back from occupational shifts means basing a class analysis on constantly changing labour markets, geography and demographics. It is far easier, and more theoretically rigorous, to reverse the causation and begin from the relationships of exploitation.

24 To say that the petty bourgeoisie's internalization of the capital-labour relation is conceptual may be true, but the question remains of how to describe the individual member of a class who participates concretely in the labour process. Weil is arguing that examining individual exchange, rather than the firm that trades commodities, is a neo-Weberian distortion. In this case, Wright may be more accurately describing a 'dominator versus dominated' relationship inside a firm, rather than "exploiter versus exploited."

188 The petty bourgeois can encompass both highly-paid wage-earners and self- employed professionals within the capital-labour relation. This interpretation fulfils a rigorous Marxist categorization of the middle class, and provides the basis for the individualist ideology of the petty bourgeois.

Petty bourgeois ideology

If the petty bourgeois are reduced to a mass of differentiated, conflicting strata, full of "temporalities, mediations, and ambiguities" (28), it is simple to ascribe relative confusion to their ideas as well. However, this avoids the analytical rigour that Marx granted the proletariat and bourgeoisie and assumes rather than explains petty bourgeois autonomy. If the petty bourgeoisie is not an array of conflictual positions but contains "the expressions of a single contradiction, reflecting changing degrees of petty bourgeois autonomy within the fundamental and dominant capitalist relation", the question becomes clearer. The petty bourgeois derive ideas from the

"unification of both labor and ownership of the means of production in the same person" (29), leading them to assume a position of "classnessness" (8). The desire to be outside of capitalism comes from having to embody its fundamental contradiction, allowing the petty bourgeois to believe they are both employers and non-exploiting,

"politically 'classless' and ideologically 'pure'" (16).

Moving away from a Weberian analysis opens up the possibility of a more coherent intermediate status. Few Marxist commentators would dispute that the "utility of professionals from the standpoint of capitalism is to help control the working class and extract surplus-value from it and to generate intellectual products and provide expert

189 services needed by the 'big' bourgeoisie" (Weil 32 Footnote 20). The petty bourgeois are helpers, suffused with the tension of internalizing the capital-labour relation, making the best sale and purchase of their own labour-power to optimize their income and control.

The petty bourgeoisie's dual nature provides the impetus for the independent strivings that localists manifest. Their "knowledge at this level has a peculiar resistance to total loss or alienation," and their "personally-held ideas does help define them as a distinct stratum" possessing a monopoly on the means of mental production in the form of educational qualifications (21). Owning the means of mental production leads to an expectation of autonomy.

Harris comes close to Weil's position when he observes that the "white-collar workers stand in relationship to capital in an identical position to manual workers, regardless of different styles of working life, status, pretensions or income" (107). This could mean both are on the capital-labour continuum; however, trapped in a neo-

Weberian analysis, he means that traditional petty bourgeois vocations have disappeared entirely. Instead, the new professionals fulfil an "analogous" role to the old middle classes and maintain "the illusion of economic independence" through providing scarce skills to capital. It is this illusory quality that provides a safe outlet to fantasies of escape from capital, or of creating humane capital, themselves useful for maintaining capitalist rule (108). While these are observable features of petty bourgeois ideology, analogy provides them with a weak basis; if the new middle classes are simply complementary, there is no reason why their ideology could not shift along with occupation.

Marx described the effect of internalizing both capital and labour well before the

190 rise of the new middle classes. Speaking of the peasantry, he writes that their material organization as small-scale, separate families, each pursuing their own form of social reproduction, prevented a cohesive community, political organization and a collective assertion of class interests (Marx "Eighteenth Brumaire" 478). Instead, the petty bourgeois relate each other through "exchange and competition among self-employed, independent and equal individuals" or families (Therborn "Ruling Class" 121). Like the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie is structurally prevented from seeing the market compulsion to sell labour-power. Underlying shifting cultural and occupational positions is a continued desire to avoid class conflict, built into the contradictory consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie, which "believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided" (107). Members of the petty bourgeoisie do not have to own small businesses to hold this attitude:

According to their education and their individual position they may be as

far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the

petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the

limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently

driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material

interest and social position drive the latter practically (Marx "Eighteenth

Brumaire" 424).

The "limits which the latter do not get beyond in life" is what binds together petty bourgeoisie past and present, attempting to sell labour power and accumulate capital

191 against much larger competitors. The petty bourgeoisie's fatalism towards large social forces combines with a voluntarist drive to overcome those barriers individually

(Jakubowski 107). The petty bourgeoisie demands institutions that attempt "not doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony" (Marx "Eighteenth Brumaire" 424). The petty bourgeoisie's mistake lies in universalizing its partiality: it creates ideology, failing to apprehend social totality and grafting its partial goals onto a complex reality that eludes it. Caught between the struggle of capital and labour to appropriate the social surplus, the petty bourgeoisie is not powerful enough to abolish either. It is not a coincidence that, outside of social crisis, the petty bourgeoisie "will focus on such characteristic demands as those for cheap credit, antimonopoly legislation or agriculture and other subsidies" - all themes that Chapter Two identified as central to localism.25 The petty bourgeoisie is opposed to the coercive power of big capital, and thus it tries to limit the autonomy of the administrative and legal state apparatus, used by large capital to dominate social life.

Restraint, limitation and autonomy encompass the class's key political goals (Therborn

"Ruling Class" 122).

25 When crisis does erupt, Lukacs claims the petty bourgeoisie is ineffective politically. "In all decisions crucial for society its [the petty bourgeoisie's] actions will be irrelevant and it will be forced to fight for both sides in turn but always without consciousness [of its objective position within the capitalist division of labour]" (60). The class vacillates, trying to dampen the contradictions that could ultimately destroy it. This depends upon historical and social circumstances, including a crisis of capital accumulation and its own relative social weight. Historically the petty bourgeoisie has been motivated by fear and envy of the bourgeoisie, which in turn will use the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram against the working class (Trotsky "Fascism"). The petty bourgeoisie will ally with the labour movement if the latter can articulate a shared antagonism with big capital. If the movement is revolutionary, the petty bourgeoisie will drawn to this politic as well. However, if its interests are not articulated, it will find populist or fascist leaders to crush independent working class interests (Therborn "Ruling Class" 122; Trotsky "The Turn"). The intense desire of the petty bourgeoisie to gain capital, combined with its fear of mass working class action, encourages this form of authoritarian populism (Trotsky Fascism).

192 Despite Jakubowski's insistence that the petty bourgeois are circulators rather than producers of value, his analysis of their ideology still holds: "the middle classes are in a position to see the symptoms of capitalism, but they cannot see the cause of those symptoms'''' (Emphasis added). Facing the combined pressures of selling and purchasing labour power, they wish to end the influence of their competitors, not competition itself.

"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" (107)

It is not true that a Marxist class theory precludes concrete analysis of ideology.

Rather, placing the petty bourgeois within the capital-labour antagonism allows Marx's insights to be applied and renewed today. In fact, it is the Weberian, time- and occupation-delineated classifications that limit ideology analysis, because "the specific features of the petty bourgeois class are considered inapplicable to modern professionals and managers." In contrast, if professionals and managers are petty bourgeois, then they contain the same "ideology of 'classlessness'" as their shopkeeper ancestors (Weil 35

Footnote 34).

There is no one single ideology for the petty bourgeoisie. However, localism is a petty bourgeoisie ideology because it projects its particular class interests onto the capitalist economy as a whole. Those particular interests may be eclectic and internally contradictory, pointing towards an appropriation of concrete reality or away from it into ideology. Yet localism reflects the structured realities of petty bourgeois reproduction in very particular ways. Its ideology can be further concretized through Bourdieu's concept

193 of habitus, which is useful once it describe the effects of a social relationship within the capital-labour antagonism, not outside of it.

Habitus

More than simply taste, habitus classifies and produces judgment. It is a product of class society: "the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes" (Bourdieu 170). For the member of a class, this division creates a

"misrecognition of an order which is also established in the mind." Lifestyles are the systematic products of habitus, not a choice. The "order... established in the mind" has a material basis: "[t]he dialectic of conditions and habitus is the basis of an alchemy which transforms the distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a power relation, into a system of perceived differences, distinctive properties, that is, a distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized" (172). Misrecognizing an objective truth is another way of describing commodity fetishism: having mistaken particular objects for relations between people, those objects not only stand in for people, but form a complex upon which to build a highly detailed, internally consistent set of practices and values: Jakubowski's "individual science" writ large upon society.

This is a descriptive judgment of petty bourgeois ideology, not a normative one.

Its traits "are the inevitable counterpart of the mechanisms providing for individual mobility." Otherwise, a judgment is "imputed to the individuals and not to the structures, on the grounds that the structures have left them free to 'choose' their alienation" (338).

No one chooses alienation, but neither are they free to escape its effects.

194 The petty bourgeois must sell and consume labour power, in a complex, ever- shifting series of equations. They become experts at consumption, and this expertise substitutes for real social power. They are forced to personalize all decisions about how to accumulate capital; no pre-existing economic or family networks tied to capital are available to assist them, and thus "the petty bourgeoisie are constantly faced with ethical, aesthetic or political dilemmas forcing them to bring the most ordinary operations of existence to the level of consciousness and strategic choice" (Bourdieu 345). Since everyday life is a series of strategic decisions, members of the petty bourgeoisie assume that the sum of their voluntary choices will create social change. Put together, these choices equal a lifestyle, which both legitimizes those who practice it and models that behaviour for others. Its lifestyles are "symbolic" acts that both legitimize those who practice them and provide a model of an "ethical avant-garde" (365). Its lifestylism makes the petty bourgeoisie unique: it is the only class to demonstrate these values not through propaganda and overt control (which it cannot hope to have) or collective resistance but instead "[s]eeking its occupational and personal salvation in the imposition of new doctrines of ethical salvation." Thus "the new petty bourgeoisie is predisposed to play a vanguard role in the struggles over everything concerned with the art of living, in particular, domestic life and consumption" (366) (Emphasis added). When the petty bourgeoisie reduces politics to voluntarism or ethical consumption, this reduction is not simply an error: it is a way of intellectually structuring its material existence.

Members of the petty bourgeoisie have little capital of their own but they expect, through their cultural and symbolic training, to attain capital in the future (333). They

195 owe "all they have to education and expect... from it all they aspire to have... [and answering to] senior executives, whose instructions they follow, whose plans they implement and whose manuals they use" (351). The younger and more socially progressive petty bourgeoisie lack control over production priorities, acting as urban functionaries who "have no autonomous initiative in elaborating plans for construction"

(Gramsci 14). Bourdieu identifies them as "the most complete realization of the petty bourgeoisie... [embodying] the cult of autodidact effort and the taste for all the activities whose common feature is that they chiefly demand time and cultural goodwill (making collections, for example)." This is no accident: they are "[a]ssigned to tasks requiring precision, rigour, seriousness, in short, goodwill and devotion" (351).

Without capital, their ethical system thrives on thrift and self-discipline, what

Bourdieu calls an "economizing mentality," as they exploit themselves and rise up through the ranks (335). The tension this creates also provides the internal "strength to extract from himself, through every form of self-exploitation (in particular, asceticism and Malthusianism), the economic and cultural means he needs in order to rise" (337).

Self-denial creates a part of localist ideology as, for example, when Schumacher calls for

"being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptations of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced" (25). This does not mean that all members of the petty bourgeoisie are self-denying and ascetic; the newer strata are often charitable and progressive. However, what marks localism as petty bourgeois is its individualism.

Without the collectivity of community ties, or the deep social power of possessing

196 capital, the petty bourgeois is forced to survive as an individual. "He is convinced that he owes his position solely to his own merit, and that for his salvation he only has himself to rely on" (Bourdieu 337). That tension does not form the basis of the gentle, small-scale, petty-commodity trading community that localism idealizes. But it is there as an undercurrent, providing urgency to the message.

To summarize, the new petty bourgeoisie is drawn to localism because its individualized reproduction strategies lead it to substitute lifestyle for politics and be drawn towards personal, rather than collective action. Bourdieu links the petty bourgeoisie's "prudent reformism in politics" to a morality based in self-discipline, arising from the need to subordinate immediate desires to achieve social mobility (351).

Bourdieu has been criticized for using a descriptive version of class as shifting conflicts within a continuum, rather than an instrumental version that begins with the fundamental separation between workers and capitalists (Weininger 90). Habitus denotes consumption as a marker of class, rather than productive relations (93). However, despite the limitations of Bourdieu's neo-Weberian basis, his empirical observations are still valid and can be applied within the capital-labour relation. Weil's concept of

"classnessness" provides a plausible basis for the difference that Bourdieu finds between the old and new layers of the petty bourgeois: one declining and avaricious, the other rising and community-oriented. Both are individual attempts to avoid class antagonisms, the former by restricting competitors - the working class, the ruling class and each other

- and the latter by appealing to social harmony.

Petty bourgeois solutions to social and ecological crisis can be concretized in

197 specific features of localist ideology. This does not mean the entire petty bourgeoisie will adopt all aspects of localism. However, under pressure from capital, labour and ecological crisis, the petty bourgeoisie draws on the values that help it accumulate: an individualized moral judgment, voluntary simplicity and the promotion of community to create ethical lifestyles.

Morality

A discussion of the relative merits of petty bourgeois morality is beyond the scope of this dissertation.26 However, the petty bourgeoisie relies on individualized forms of moral judgment in order to form its political programs. This is reflected in nineteenth century petty bourgeois politics: when confronted with contradictions between his ideals of free and fair exchange and the reality of monopolies under capitalism, Proudhon made a moral judgment, praising what was good in capitalism while jettisoning the rest

(McNally "Against" 153). Schumacher repeated this operation 125 years later, making an external moral judgment of capitalism: "now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position" (20). For lack of wisdom, as the basis for morality, humanity creates "a monster economy, which destroys the world" through "greed and envy" driving war and competition (24). The misuse of land derives from a lack of a "firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values", leading instead to economics as the sole arbiter of worth (93). The problem of society is "the neglect, indeed the rejection, of wisdom... the disease having been caused by allowing

26 Trotsky's Their Morals And Ours provides a useful dissection of the interaction between moral systems and class struggle, identifying the petite bourgeoisie's escape to nostalgia: "the most sincere and at the same time the most limited petty bourgeois moralists still live even today in the idealized memories of yesterday and hope for its return" (24).

198 cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure."

Wisdom is self-contained: historical and scientific inquiry cannot find it, since "it can be found only inside oneself', before which "one has first to liberate oneself from such masters as greed and envy" (24). A true recognition of our humbleness is thus required:

"Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self- destruction" (131).

Schumacher's distress is a human reaction to the tremendous waste and suffering that capitalist economies create. Marx commiserated, devoting large parts of Capital

Volume One to the horrors of child labour. However, Marx saw capitalism as a system whose all-consuming need to generate value creates exploitation, growth and crisis.

Without that understanding, localism mistakes capitalism's consequences for its causes and hopes wisdom and morality will correct it. That judgment becomes intensely personal, turned back on humanity as a whole. Kingsolver castigates the human species for being "good at making our dreams manifest and we do, historically speaking, get what we wish for. What are the just desserts for a species too selfish or preoccupied to hope for rain when the land outside is dying?" (8). The consequences of being selfish and preoccupied, detached from an analysis of how workers survive in a capitalist division of labour, can only be a personal failing. As individuals, we assume responsibility for the entire system: "we automatically become accomplices of the devastation that is wrought on the earth by the spread of unsustainable agricultural methods" (Petrini 66).

So many of us have failed that the culture is at fault: "Global-scale alteration from pollution didn't happen when human societies started using a little bit of fossil fuel. It

199 happened after unrestrained growth, irresponsible management, and a cultural refusal to assign any moral value to excessive consumption" (Kingsolver 345). Indeed, it is our lack of goodness which has permitted this state of affairs to arise in the first place: "If we permit [land mismanagement by agribusiness], this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over" (Schumacher 93).

Even a radical, anti-capitalist critique adopts the same logic when it substitutes the spread of bad ideas for historical materialist analysis. Carrlson acknowledges that

"the dominant capitalist system is still standing in the way. Nations and corporations don't hesitate to destroy impediments to their control up to and including mass murder."

However, the problem is still in our heads: "we also carry and reproduce dominant assumptions and norms about property and individual freedom that are powerful impediments to inventing a new life based on a common wealth" (210). While this is arguably true, once "dominant assumptions and norms" are identified as the most important stumbling block, it hardly matters whether the cause is socialism or Buddhism.

We have failed in our heads before we even act upon the world.

We must be very bad to have allowed industrialism to rule for over a century.

Structural explanations are dismissed: "A great shout of triumph goes up whenever anybody has found some further evidence... of unfreedom, some further indication that people cannot help being what they are and doing what they are doing, no matter how inhuman their actions might be. The denial of freedom, of course, is a denial of

200 responsibility" (Schumacher 192). This responsibility extends from our sense of right and wrong to our intellectual understanding of the world and even what we put in our mouths.

Freedom of choice, and the need to shoulder personal responsibility for our crimes, resonates with some familiar, religious tropes. According to Kingsolver, the

"conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners" (Kingsolver 67). We have transgressed, not only against the planet but also against our very souls. Religious judgement awaits our poor consumption habits: "California vegetables are not the serpent, it's all of us who open our veins to the flow of gas-fueled foods, becoming yawning addicts, while our neighbourhood farms dry up and blow away. We seem to be built with a faulty gauge for moderation" (158). Having yielded to "the serpent", the appropriate action is to repent; yet "[h]ow is it possible to inspire an appropriately repentant stance toward a planet that is really, really upset... The cure involves reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new kind of person", who will abide by the values of thrift and self-restraint (345).

Voluntary simplicity

According to localist ideology, the ecological crisis is the fault of our own greed: today's activists, who reject consumer culture, grew up wealthy but rejected their "cohort

[who] became shoppers just as avidly as their forebears" (Carrlson 165). The cohort must be made to live differently. The solution lies in "scrutinising our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced" (Schumacher 25). There is no distinction made between the poor seeking material security, and the rich achieving wisdom through abandoning worldly goods. Indeed, Schumacher speaks against "universal prosperity"

201 because it does not provide security: the rich "have never felt secure against the poor", and the poor have nothing to lose. Wealth eliminates ethics with "our marvellous powers of science and technology", our "scientific rationality and technical competence" (12).

Wealth uses science, technology and rationality to eliminate ethics. Note that

Schumacher is not condemning the misery and struggle of poverty, but the lack of social peace that conflict brings.

The solution is self-restraint, which will create quality interactions between individuals. In a localist society, "[y]ou may not have quite as many small appliances, because they may cost a few dollars more, but you'll be happier" (McKibben 108). The lack of possessions dovetails with a nostalgia for the past when "people felt a little constrained about showing off wealth" (124). The past was a realm of balance and harmony: "we may be able to re-create at least some of the institutions that marked, say,

Adam Smith's Britain, and hence create some of that moderating sense of responsibility"

(125). Apparently debtors' prisons, the poorhouse and church-based welfare created

"responsibility", although whether that sentiment was created in the poor, or those who governed the poor is not specified. Even the Great Depression is lauded for its positive effect on social solidarity, but "we don't want another Depression even if it would have an excellent effect on morale" (126). The call to live with less is not phrased in terms of a rigorous ascetism, but rather as a gentle reminder to people who have attained a level of security to not make their consumption too conspicuous. This reflects the petty bourgeoisie's strategy for accumulation based on self-denial, tempered with the liberal optimism of the professional classes, and it fits well with the rollback agenda of

202 neoliberalism.

Voluntarism

Voluntarism, in this usage, means substituting one's own habitus-based activity for the strategic-political work of building social movements. The petty bourgeoisie display "the voluntaristic rigour of the 'called' but not yet 'chosen', who base their pretension to embody one day what 'ought to be' on a permanent invocation of 'ought'"

(Bourdieu 337). The Utopian character of localist schemes reflect this freedom, where the world that "ought to be" is lived in the present to a greater or lesser extent, and this act comes to stand in for political strategy. What Carrlson calls the "new social formations" are composed of people who have distanced themselves, voluntarily or otherwise, from jobs and academia and relieved "themselves of the pressure to conform to a hostile ideological culture." He names "bicycling activists, free software developers, biofuel advocates, etc. [who] are either themselves well-educated, or are the children of the professional stratum. But 'professionalism' has lost its hold... [and] people are walking away" (30).

The markers of the petty bourgeoisie appear again, in the well-educated professionals who form the base of anti-market localism. But despite having abandoned the struggle for self-improvement, they share the same individualist striving of their class, except in reverse. Carrlson quotes an activist from Portland who says, "Most, but not all

[bicycle activists] have an upper middle class background. They all have a comfortable enough life that they can spend time doing this. They can play" (152). The assumption that the life conditions of one's own "upper middle class background" are generalizable is

203 a marker of habitus. Sandwiched between capital and labour, the intermediate strata romanticize an idealized working class. The localists pride themselves on how much hard, messy work their projects contain. On biofuels, "they take a lot of energy and thought and all those things, and they're also not always fun. Sometimes it's miserable, and you're exhausted" (168). This is work for those whose regular jobs are not dirty or challenging. Gardening requires a similar sacrifice, taking "hours bent to our crops as if enslaved", yet proving "addicting" labour in the end (Kingsolver 178).

Carrlson explains that "[t]his kind of work reinforces a subculture that prides itself on a certain willingness to sacrifice and even suffer, which helps participants feel different and, too often, morally superior to folks who don't want to get down and dirty in pursuit of ecological sanity" (168). Yet feeling "morally superior" to those outside the subculture is not an aberration, if one's accumulation strategy is governed by individualized reproduction. The voluntarism Bourdieu identifies appears in localist discourse as a choice whether or not to participate in wage labour. As one activist says: "I look at work as ways of getting paid to learn new things... I am not insecure enough about my ability to make money that I'm going to settle for stability and security over my sense of what feels right and what feels good" (175). Market compulsion is replaced by a psychological imperative to be secure enough to choose good work. The motivation behind this choice rests on an understanding of the alienation inherent in waged labour.

In contrast, "un-waged work fulfils and confirms a multidimensional sensibility, providing a whole range of feelings and experiences beyond the narrow instrumentalism of work for money" (172). This is correct; however, defining wage labour as an

204 unpleasant choice can only be the attitude of those who have either accumulated enough capital to escape the need to sell their labour power, or sell it in conditions that they partly control. Without this coercion, anything is possible, an insight that can take on almost mystical proportions: when talking to neighbours and relatives, "the message is the same. Anything's possible, we can manifest any reality we desire" (Estill 9). The localist petty bourgeoisie is free to posit their particular lifestyle or choice of occupation as emancipatory.

Community

For pro-market localists, people can be empowered through ethical market choices, and admitting the market destroys individuals would be contradictory. Anti-market localists are clearer on how capitalism works but believe we can step outside the market to defeat it. Both are wrestling with the powerlessness evoked by trying to compete with capital; faced with this unpalatable conclusion, all localists cling to a fierce faith in community values to create a more humane world.

Localism does not define the geographic borders of community but uses it to evoke a sense of togetherness and solidarity within local spaces. This invokes the original definition of community: as a space for building "collaborative nonmarket relations" between people (Gough 407). The values of community are disputed: they can be mobilized from below, by workers and marginalized populations resisting neoliberalism, or from above, by the capitalist state trying to implant neoliberal social relations at the local level (418). However, in the positive sense of communities building solidarity against market relations, Marx's description of alienation anticipated the localist yearning

205 for community, outside of and resistant to bland, corporate-designed spaces.27

The petty bourgeoisie is frustrated in its search for community, since members of the class rely on themselves and their immediate families for economic progress and emotional support. Community members are either fellow petty bourgeois competitors, or customers demanding lower prices. Perhaps this why so many localists have such a strong nostalgia for community, as an ideal place where business happens and values take shape. If you "think of yourself as a member of a community... you'll get a better deal.

You'll build a world with some hope of ecological stability, and where the chances increase that you'll be happy" (McKibben 108). Farmers' markets are promoted because of their sociability: "consumers have ten times as many conversations at farmers' markets as they do at supermarkets... You go from being a mere consumer to being a participant"

(105). Activist opposition to "commerce" is inspired by the "drive for community and innovation" (Carrlson 180). McKibben suggests local shopping will even reverse income inequality, as living close to one another will make "the affluent start again to feel some responsibility for their neighbors" (124). When, exactly, the affluent took care of the less affluent is not mentioned; the logic is simply that "it's harder... to be a selfish jerk if you live in a community, if you understand that these are the people with whom you will spend your life" (125). Local economies assuage alienation: "local economies equal community, which in turn equals a better shot at deep satisfaction" (231). He finds this model in Europe, where they "emphasize 'community relationships over individual

27 This is not lost on capital, which can appropriate the desires of localism; for example, Starbucks decorates its cafes with used furniture to "individually design each store to fit in with its local area so that no two Starbucks will look exactly alike", in line with CEO Howard Schultz's goal to "harken back to this sense of community" (Teather).

206 autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth'" (225).

While these assertions may be ahistorical, they manifest an interesting part of the petty bourgeois psyche: why is it that localists are so desperate for conversations where they shop? It is equally valid to appreciate the anonymity and speed of grocery store transactions if one has other outlets for social interaction. But the work of the petty bourgeoisie is, as Bourdieu says, "the competition of antagonistic pretensions": set against workers, big capitalists and each other, the petite-bourgeoisie's first concern is how close the profit margin is. The realm of consumption not only affords the most familiarity, it is there that they can reinforce their status as participants in the circulation process, and compete to achieve the latest marker of habitus in a never-ending battle for status and mobility.

Just as ideology is a single class's way of life generalized to all of society, community for the petty bourgeois becomes community for them alone. Schumacher conflates industrialism and urbanism, blaming them for "the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul" (45). Estill sings the praises of small-town entrepreneur ship: "Whether it's the studio artist, the lettuce grower, the wood man, the yoga instructor, or the network monitoring guru, at the heart of a vibrant economy is a meaningful living for one" (58). Berry goes further, criticizing corporations, governments and schools for concealing a "private aim [which] has been to reduce radically the number of people who, by the measure of our historical ideals, might be thought successful: the self-employed, the owners of small businesses or small usable properties,

207 those who work at home" (411). This sense of persecution of the self-employed sets those who wish to "do everything we can to support strong local communities and strong community economics" against "Communists and capitalists [who] are alike in their contempt for country people, country life, and country places. They have exploited the countryside with equal greed and disregard" (412). The invocation of the rural is important as signifying the "local community", but it is equally important who gets included in "the community party... small farmers, ranchers, and market gardeners; worried consumers; owners and employees of small businesses; self-employed people; religious people; and conservationists" (413).

The inference is clear: the working class has no place in community, unless it is as a subordinate to the petty bourgeoisie. The images evoked - the town square, the butcher, baker and small shopkeeper - are characteristic of market towns, where residents worked in circuits of exchange, not production. Industrial towns, in contrast, were often centres of intense class struggle between owners and workers (Brecher 4,22, 63). Not coincidentally, industrial towns created close community networks based on shared struggle at the point of production, not consumption.

Yet localism never mentions these histories of collective solidarity, preferring to invoke fantasies of petty commodity production and trading. The word "community" itself elides class differences, evading difficult questions about which groups have more strategic power. It replaces class solidarity with differences based on income and culture and is "reflected in the bourgeois ideology of pluralism and participatory democracy, the essence of which is that no one group should be too big." Community action interferes

208 with localities' abilities to find natural allies, substituting "groups in neighbourhood territories [which] struggle in competition for the limited resources offered them"

(Cockburn 161), rather than focusing on class conflict in struggles over local resources.

By invoking community, localism attempts the political equivalent of Proudhon's fair markets for small artisans, imposing a false social peace by eliminating the working class rhetorically

Lifestyle

Localism poses multiple versions of Bourdieu's proper "domestic life and consumption" through which to live ethically. Kingsolver harkens back to the counterculture of the 1960s: "In a nation pouring its resources into commodity agriculture... back to the land is an option with a permanent, quiet appeal" (179). She idolizes rural life: "[m]any of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia... a secret longing for some connection a to a life where a rooster crows in the yard" (179), and she writes a chapter on the restrained, eco-connected lives of the

Amish (150). Agreeing that people should go "back to the land", Petrini the gastronomist thinks everyone should mirror his lifestyle choice and become gastronomists (139). Since commodification makes producers and distributors ignorant of food quality, Petrini's consumer achieves heroic status: "there is only one figure who can unite and concern everyone: the new gastronome" (171). Gastronomes form communities, which link up, forming a world network from different cultures. Alienation begins to ease: "when we start to lose the feeling of being alone ... and we are able to work in the name of our community of destiny, no business, no change, no machine will be able to stop our quest

209 for happiness" (207).

More far-sighted localists like Smith and MacKinnon realize that their lifestyle choices do not, in fact, accomplish their goals, seeing localism as a fashionable trend: "I am not deluded enough to feel that I'm making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world." This is based on the knowledge that, despite "travel[ing] these ethical pathways" for twenty years the environment continues to deteriorate, "and my being has done little to change the world" (17). However, the main premise is then simply repeated:

"The problem everywhere nowadays turns on how we shall decide to live" (Hoagland qtd. in Smith and MacKinnon 18). Faced with the environmental crisis, and the failure of ethical lifestyle choices that are evident even to the localists, the answer is: more localist values.

The localist lifestyle begins to sound like a way to ease the loneliness of precarious, individualized labour, rather than simply a way to organize production more rationally. This explains why each localist promotes the specific benefits of her lifestyle: after all, it is that lifestyle which assuaged her particular experience of alienation.

Carrlson devotes his book to it, with chapters on permaculture technologies, DIY bicycle repairs, biofuels production, open-source software writers and attendees of the annual

Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. What ties them together is a desire to escape alienation within capitalism, attracting "people [who] are taking initiatives outside of wage-labor and business to make the world we want to live in now" (Carrlson 52).

It makes sense that members of the petty bourgeoisie, caught in a struggle to succeed in the marketplace or gain autonomy on their own merits, would feel lonely.

210 Their attempts to re-forge the social connections lost in the marketplace are on the same individualized basis as their strategies for accumulation. This culminates in demonstrating one's opposition to capitalism through a commitment to an alternative lifestyle. This act can be given a political gloss, as when Carrlson draws on Gramsci and

Hobsbawn to argue that cultural politics provide the basis for new anticapitalism.

Subcultures alone are not enough, but alternative lifestyles "are essential precursors to a broader political movement, though none of them is a guarantee that such a movement will happen" (Carrlson 238).

This is the crux of every lifestyle argument: culture will one day erupt into political change. To do so, culture must be equated with lifestyle and individual behaviours. However, Marxism defines culture as a broad network of social institutions, such as education, technology and science that reflect and shape class society (Eagleton

115). Gramsci, a leader of Communist Party of Italy, saw culture strategically, calling on the Party to create institutions that could counter the influence of the state, capital, fascists and the church. Culture was not a series of individual choices on how to live, but a realm of struggle at the heart of capitalist institutions.

Bookchin derides lifestyle choices as a way to demonstrate political commitments: "[i]n a time when even respectable forms of socialism are in pell-mell retreat from principles that might in any way be construed as radical, issues of lifestyle are once again supplanting social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism" (8).

How one lives becomes an act of propaganda. There is no sense of strategic thinking about where the contradictions lie in people's actual lived experience and thus what the

211 basis for "social action" might be. In its place is a set of instructions on how to conduct

oneself, steeped in moralism and based on "individual autonomy rather than social

freedom" (10).

From this perspective, even the most anti-market localists must fall back on an

individualized, contradictory politics. Carrlson ends his discussion of lifestyles with a

simple expression of hope, imagining "a harmonious and peaceful transition to a sensible,

humane, and comfortable life for everyone", where we can "consciously redirect our

collaborative energies to a world of our own design." However, he cautions that a

"politically savvy Nowtopia has yet to appear" (252). The strength of this vision rests in

its plan to organize production by human need. However, Carrlson departs from the

socialist tradition by hoping that an adding-up of lifestyles will overturn entrenched

structures of power. His honourable socialist sentiments dissipate in the billions of

individual lifestyles that would need to change, by localism's own slow, adding-up

process, in order to overturn entrenched capitalist power.

An individualistic focus on lifestyle, defined as personal consumption in a market

economy, accords with the class position of the petty bourgeoisie. Along with Bourdieu,

Bookchin suggests the psychology of the class is predisposed towards seeing individual

lifestyle choices as liberatory, creating an egoism that substitutes its own demands and

personal satisfactions, allowing "no room for social institutions, political organizations,

and radical programs, still less a public sphere" (51). In its self-centredness and

disavowal of collectivity, lifestylism mimics the precepts of neoclassical economics.

"The ego, identified almost fetishistically as the locus of emancipation, turns out to be

212 identical to the 'sovereign individual' of laissez-faire individualism. Detached from its social moorings, it achieves not autonomy but the heteronomous 'selfhood' of petty- bourgeois enterprise." Yet at the moment members of the petty bourgeoisie feel most free to pursue a lifestyle, they are the most closely integrated into the capitalist economy, relying as it does on the "myth of individual freedom" to conceal the "laws of competition." A lifestyle advocate "is entirely captive to the subterranean market forces that occupy all the allegedly 'free' terrains of modern social life, from food cooperatives to rural communes" (52). The idea that freedom could be built in the interstices of capitalism arises from the petty bourgeoisdesire to impose social harmony on the massive, contradictory forces of capital and labour.

Utopianism

The power of the petty bourgeoisie's own values does not shape the material world: "its own objectives - which exist exclusively in its own consciousness - must become progressively weakened and increasingly divorced from social action. Ultimately they will assume purely 'ideological' forms" (Lukacs 60). Its idealist schemes for social reorganization can only gain traction if another class adopts them; the necessity to accumulate capital clashes with the "real economic interests" which are opposed to them

(60). Indeed, the "full consciousness of their situation would reveal to them the hopelessness of their particularist strivings in the face of the inevitable course of events.

Consciousness and self-interest then are mutually incompatible in this instance" (61).

Since the power of its moral vision does not check the power of capital or labour, the petty bourgeoisie must find relief through utopianism: the attempt to create ideal societies

213 where the contradictions of capitalism do not exist.

Marx and Engels knew utopianism well and had a healthy appreciation for the current, which was ruthless in its condemnation of existing capitalist conditions despite its confusion over how to change them (Draper "Karl Marx's" 3). Engels praised Saint-

Simon, Fourier and Owen, the "three great Utopians" who argued that the "demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves" (Engels "Socialism" Section One).

However, the Utopians attempted to solve injustice through idealist means, creating the necessary "perfect system of social order" to "impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments" (Section One). A theory of irreconcilable class antagonisms, based on the expropriation of the labour power of the working class, would have to wait for large-scale development of capitalist social relations. In the meantime, the Utopians were the worthy forebears of socialism, who saw the symptoms but not the cause.

The Utopians set their plans against the world at large and then condemned that world for not sharing them. Marx said that those who "confront the world as doctrinaires" create the terrain of struggle in their own heads, which is a form of ideology (qtd. in

Draper "Karl Marx's" 12). Without an analysis of the forces shaping the world, a Utopian

"critique existed on one side of a yawning gulf, on the other side of which was the new world. To get to the other side, the Utopian took "a great leap into the void, on the wings of speculative abstraction" (Draper "Karl Marx's" 13). What the Utopians lacked was a

214 way to conceptualize present realities as an outcome of historical development, including how social revolutions actually take place. Therefore they "clothed their aims 'in the form of pious wishes of which one couldn't say why they had to be fulfilled right now and not a thousand years earlier or later'" (Marx, qtd. in Draper "Karl Marx's" 20). Marx contrasted this with historical investigation: "We do not confront the world as doctrinaires with a new principle and call on them to kneel before it in admiration: 'We develop new principles for the world out of the principles of the world itself" (12).

Utopias, like all systems of ideas, do not stand apart from the material organization of society. They too derive from the trajectory of classes in motion. Model- building, in of itself, does not define Utopias; rather, the kind of Utopias demonstrate the outlook of the class proposing them. What Williams calls a "heuristic Utopia", basing itself on alternative values without providing concrete maps to implement them, arises in

"a society in which change is happening, but primarily under the direction and in the terms of the dominant social order itself." From a position of powerlessness, the heuristic

Utopia provides a critique of dominant trends, which also "has the weakness that it can settle into isolated and in the end sentimental 'desire', a mode of living with alienation"

("Utopia" 203). Williams suggests the post-1968 Utopia emerged from the defeated activists of the left-wing movements who questioned the very possibility of transforming society. Relatively affluent, they rejected material wealth as corrupt, and imagined voluntary deprivation as the only possible response. They did not consider transforming a wealthy society, and therefore their ideas remained a Utopia only to those experiencing a crisis of power, without an appeal to "all those still subject to extreme exploitation, to

215 avoidable poverty and disease." Utopia became transforming another world, not a "this- world" (212).

Utopias arose from previous disillusionments as well, and Marx found an example in his critique of Proudhon. It is not only that Proudhon misunderstood capitalism as a system of small-scale exchanges, but that his schemes for a national credit society and labor-money anticipated the new society without dealing with the contradictions of the old one. The class appeal of Proudhonism was obvious for those petty bourgeois whose hard work was undercut by the production of large-scale factories. They wanted to receive full value for their production while maintaining capitalist relations that allowed them to profit individually (Draper "Karl Marx's" 16). The viability of social reform could only be proved through small-scale models at the margins of, or outside of society, where big capital did not find it profitable to interfere. And since "these communities were arbitrary constructs, not developments, they encouraged the thinking up of precise blueprints for the minutiae of community life... the control being naturally exercised by the philanthropic do-gooders in charge" (18).

Some acknowledge their debt to this tradition: Hahnel, himself critical of localism, nonetheless announces "my belief that new evidence from the past thirty years has weakened the case for scientific socialism even further, and greatly strengthened the case for Utopian socialism, and it is time for anticapitalists to adjust our thinking accordingly" (390 Note 3). The do-gooders may be in charge, as in Estill's intentional community owned and operated by smallholders (125). Or localists may simply hope for a diffusion of "small and voluntary schemes like those that have begun to change the

216 food market" (McKibben 116). Shuman recognizes that at "the end of the day, any business that sacrifices its bottom line in the name of [social] responsibility leaves itself vulnerable to a hostile acquisition by another... firm that has got the mettle to make...

'hard choices'" (60). However, local ownership will combine with strong local ordinances to protect social standards and "enlightened shareholders" who will stop unenlightened local owners from moving to escape those standards. Somehow the shareholders are not holding shares to make money, but to "presumably know, appreciate, and even honor many of their neighbors, [so] they are more likely than absentee owners to make more community-friendly choices" In case they do not, Shuman relies on "public education and peer pressure" to remind them (62).

Here we see the Utopian logic of localism taken to its conclusion. Large businesses are subject to SNALT and move accordingly. Small businesses are not supposed to, and responsible shareholders will enlighten them. The shareholders themselves will be made responsible through education. The drive to lower costs, and resulting push for centralization, will be overcome when enlightened capitalists see the damage they are causing.

Marx criticized the utopianism of petty bourgeois efforts to establish capital without capitalism, calling it an "illusion... that all commodities can simultaneously be imprinted with the stamp of direct exchangeability, in the same way that it might be imagined that all Catholics can be popes." The "petty bourgeois... views the production of commodities as the absolute summit of human freedom and individual independence."

From this vantage point, it was possible to desire direct exchange of concrete labours

217 while hoping that "the impossibility of exchanging commodities directly, which are inherent in the form... be removed" ("Capital Volume One" 161 Footnote 26).

Localism's invocation of community, morality and voluntary simplicity amounts to the same thing: an attempt to impose a moral order on capitalist production and exchange, while standing outside of that process.

Catastrophism

The problem with utopianism is not simply its projection of the future into the present in a manner that avoids strategic discussion of political priorities. When the gap between real and imagined grows too large, those placing their hopes in Utopia eventually despair. Of course, a sense of immanent catastrophe does not rest well alongside the individualized solutions to social crisis that the petty bourgeoisie espouses.

If small changes in lifestyle and consumption habits truly can change society, then the task is achievable and there is no reason to panic. It is only when the liberalism of the petty bourgeoisie is challenged by a recognition of the scale of the crisis, that mild reformism collapses into something darker. Having never considered capitalism as a system of exploitation of the majority - and by nature of their class, suspicious of mass movements - the petty bourgeois abandon hope and await social breakdown.

A sense that catastrophe is imminent underscores localism. McKibben summarizes the history of the last 100 years under its rubric: "the old accommodations with state capitalism and social democracy that 20*^ century working class politics settled for, are closed. Global climate change, war, crashing biodiversity, waste and industrial pollution, mass starvation, and epidemic disease are just the top of a long list of pressing

218 reasons to radically change how we live on earth" (236). Kingsolver suggests we "all may have some hungry months ahead of us, even hungry years, when a warmed-up globe changes the rules of a game we smugly thought we'd already aced" (325). Climate change will make earth less viable for humans in every area of social life: "basic industries like agribusiness, oil, chemicals, automobiles, asphalt (and many more), will probably contract suddenly, often into total collapse" (Carrlson 46). Speaking of poor people in the Global South, Schumacher enthuses that "they are survival artists and it is quite certain that if there should be a real resources crisis, or a real ecological crisis, in this world, these people will survive. Whether you and I will survive, is much more doubtful" (Schumacher, qtd. in McRobie 2). Even an expression of optimism is tempered with disaster: the "foundations [of a new world]... are solidifying... at least as fast as the planet is descending into chaos" (Carrlson 252).

There is plenty of evidence that the capitalist marketplace cannot account for environmental costs and is fundamentally testing the ecosystem's capacity for reproduction. Marxists have asserted for a long time that capitalism is such a fundamental contradiction to human life that it will destroy us all. As Luxemburg argued in 1915,

"Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war" ("Junius" Chapter One). Her warning of barbarism was a product of the carnage of the First World War, which Marxists saw as an inevitable

219 result of inter-imperialist competition.

For her, crisis is capital's inability to realize the value embodied in production, and it is predicated on large-scale capitalist development ("Reform" 68). Large capital uses up all opportunities for expansion within national boundaries while increasing labour productivity. It produces more than can be sold profitably, and although it tries to realize the embedded value in markets overseas, Luxemburg says the idea of the world market spreading infinitely is "a physical impossibility" (69). By posing absolute limits on the scope of exploitation, she presages the ecological critique of capitalism.

This is an improvement over localist theories of catastrophe, based on an absolute shortage of use-values; instead, crisis in the Marxist sense arises from the internal laws of capitalist motion that create an inability to realize exchange-values. But Luxemburg does not address two other possibilities: new forms of internal exploitation, or the destruction of existing, less efficient forces of production (Harvey "Spaces" 43). She assumes capital cannot realize the value embodied into commodities at home or abroad; yet capital is generally capable of providing its own effective demand (Shaikh 229). This forms new bases for capitalist profitability and explains why, when capitalism goes into crisis, it does not collapse of its own accord. This is the third position between complete stability and a belief that the absolute, physical limits to growth will bring down the system.

Capitalism offsets its crises onto workers and the environment, progressively undermining the basis for production.

From this perspective, the localists are in good company with Luxemburg. If "the socialist transformation is... the consequence of the internal contradictions of the

220 capitalist order - then with this order will develop its contradictions, resulting inevitably, at some point, in its collapse" ("Reform" 60). Substitute a bioregion or network of small communities for the term "socialist", and the argument holds: if capitalism creates the seeds of its own destruction, radicals should organize to replace it. It is contradictory to combine a catastrophist perspective with incremental reforms: why make small-scale changes when the entire system is in imminent danger of collapse? This lack of systemic alternatives is an implicit admission that "the 'means of adaptation' are really capable of stopping the breakdown of the capitalist system and thereby enable capitalism to maintain itself by suppressing its own contradictions" (60).

It appears strange, then, that the only localist to engage with crisis theory opposes it. Hahnel says governments can spend to prop up demand, and thus "the idea that capitalism contains internal contradictions that act as seeds for its own destruction is simply wrong and needs to be discarded once and for all" ("Economic" 60). This criticism appears to concur with Marx's concept of the capital circuit, in that government demand absorbs part of the surplus value through Circuits I and III. However, as shown in Chapter One, Marx was not an underconsumptionist: crisis comes from poor profitability and a lack of investment, not a lack of aggregate demand by government or consumers (Brewer 34). Second, capitalism is just as capable of lurching into massive crisis today as it was in Marx's day: specifically, as a crisis of capitalist markets to adequately measure abstract labour in the form of derivatives (McNally "Financial

Crisis" 15). Third, and most importantly, Hahnel uses crisis theory to dismiss class society as a whole, claiming that capitalism does not "nurture the seeds of its own

221 replacement" by creating "a growing, homogeneous, working class whose economic activities lead them to see the advantages of seizing and managing the means of production themselves." Instead, capitalism creates an ideology of commercialism to maintain stability ("Economic" 62). Hahnel acknowledges that "laissez-faire capitalism" will not satisfy the economic needs of the Third World, new technologies will not prevent environmental destruction, financial crises will destroy working class livelihoods and the gap between rich and poor will widen ("Economic" 61). But these externalities of the system are apparently not internally contradictory or destructive enough.

In making what appears to be a semantic distinction between crisis and externalities, Hahnel is echoing a central premise of the neoclassical economics he wants to dispute: that capitalism tends towards equilibrium. This is no different than "the individual capitalist... [who] reflects in his mind the economic facts around him just as they appear when deformed by the laws of competition" (Luxemburg "Reform" 92).

Since individual capitalists can purchase labour-power and technology, they believe capitalism can be regulated, "arriv[ing] in time at the desire to palliate the contradictions of capitalism" (93). If there are no crises capable of threatening the system's existence, posing concrete questions needing analysis and organized resistance, then all anti- capitalists can do is propose alternatives at the level of ideas and hope enough individuals implement them. This is precisely what Hahnel advocates: "I suggest progressive economic activists see ourselves as engaged in a struggle that is centuries old, a tug of war between those who would further refine and consolidate the system of competition and greed that been spreading its sway for almost five centuries, and those who oppose its

222 spread and struggle to achieve a more equitable system of economic cooperation"

("Economic" 63). The system may be unfair, but it is fundamentally stable: all we can do is build alternatives and hope for a critical mass of adherents. The neoclassical agree and do not waste time seeking alternatives.

Hahnel accuses socialists of spending more time selling newspapers than being activists ("Economic" 304); however, his logic leaves little alternative other than abstract propagandizing for ideal societies. Luxemburg wryly suggests, "the people who abandoned Marx's theory of crises only because no crisis occurred within a certain space of time merely confused the essence of the theory with an inessential particularity"

(Luxemburg "Reform" 66 Footnote 9). Taken charitably, this suggests political economy is just confusing; however, more insidiously, acknowledging the roots of crisis means acknowledging the power big business has to shape the terrain on which small firms, ethical or otherwise, have to operate. Hahnel is committed to building alternatives now; to be consistent, he may have made "inessential particularity" central to his analysis to create an ideology of small-scale, voluntarist change. However, if capitalism does offload its crises, it risks undermining the political basis for its own reproduction, and what matters is how workers respond.

Unfortunately, most localists do not address this question politically. Rather than analyzing how and why crisis occurs, they reel from the consequences. A photographer of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina says, "I'm starting to feel disaster as a real thing - that it's not i/but when. And I feel helpless" (Kingsolver 304). Helplessness is a natural reaction when faced with natural disaster. However, the liberal optimism of the new petty

223 bourgeoisie provides a modicum of resilience, and some see the coming apocalypse as a vindication of their schemes. "In so many ways, disaster makes us take stock. For me it had inspired powerful cravings about living within our means. I wasn't thinking so much of my household budget or the national one but the big budget, the one that involves consuming approximately the same things we produce" (234). The contours of crisis for the localists begin to take shape: catastrophe will rebalance the books. In a model oriented towards size, the problem is excess. Estill glows with anticipation for the coming holocaust: "Resource depletion, societal collapse, and impending doom may just be the best thing that ever happened to 'community'" (214). In the place of basic industries

"will emerge local, site-specific, derivative, ecologically sane alternatives under (some kind of new democratic) community design and control, based on the social and technological experiments going on already... [conducted by] the tinkerers who wouldn't wait for approval, and are already creating viable prototypes in the present" (Carrlson

46).

Underlying the assessment of the impact of catastrophe is more individualism: since localists base their catastrophism on the technical limits of available resources, it follows that the people who use up those resources are the problem.28 Humans have consumed the finite amount of resources available and have no creative capacities to live rationally. This fundamentally conservative view of human nature has deep roots.

28 The recent Peak Oil thesis has provided catastrophism with new life. As McKibben argues, "[f]or the moment, large-scale, centralized farming works. But that may change if the price of oil (the lifeblood of industrial agriculture) continues to climb, or if the climate keeps changing rapidly, or if global politics deteriorates" (51). Peak oil is an attractive thesis because it points out the absolute limits of a carbon-based economy. However, the power of oil companies to trade on supposed supply volatility dictates oil prices far more readily than estimations of remaining oil reserves (Cochrane).

224 Malthusianism

Catastrophism's philosophical roots stretch back at least to the turn of the nineteenth century and the work of Thomas Malthus. While Malthus' own views were internally inconsistent, his purpose and those of his epigones remained clear: to remove any idea of a natural right to subsistence by the poor. He attempted this, through different editions of his Essay on Population, by imputing inherent characteristics to the poor: profligacy in consumption, indolence and sexual voracity. Put together, people would be unable to control their impulses to breed, and thus "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio" (Malthus 4). Starvation would result, as too many people competed for too few resources. Moreover, the development of industrial society itself would remove labourers from agriculture, decreasing food production at the moment it was under the most pressure. Any social welfare introduced to ameliorate the workers' condition would echo what would later be called, in neoclassical economics, a market disequilibrium: an inefficiency in the natural supply and demand of the means to live. It was best to let the poor die if they could not find food; to this end, Malthus suggested that the poor relief law be repealed, and social assistance denied to children born a year after the law's cancellation (McNally "Against" 88).

Malthus attempted to prove that poverty and its associated vices were natural and that changing society would have no impact on them. He criticized Godwin, who blamed people's social ills on "the injustice of their political and social institutions." The

225 problem, however, was "the fixed and unalterable laws of nature, must ever be subject to the evil temptations arising from want, besides other passions." In a world driven by vice, attempts to reform "cannot be afloat in the world without generating a variety of bad men" (Malthus 85). Faced with a finite food supply, the struggle for scarce resources would create thieves eager to steal from the worthy rich. Malthus' major revision, in later editions of the Essay, was to back down from the inevitability of human dieback and to assert that, with proper moral restraint, people could lift themselves from poverty. But that morality was itself asserted through the market: if people had to fight for their own survival, their energies and virtues would increase as a result. Thus, those with money were not simply lucky or propertied, but morally fitter than the poor (McNally "Against"

90). Cutting social welfare not only saved unnecessary expense, it was good for the poor themselves. The only way the latter could act morally was by restraining their needs and proving their worth through hard work. Malthus managed to turn poverty from a social ill into the moral responsibility of poor individuals, and his ideological trick was readily taken up by later generations of ruling class theorists (94). Malthusianism provided the basis for cutbacks to poor relief in the 1830s, when poor rural labourers across England were in open revolt (102).

Malthus also contributed to bourgeois economics. As Proudhon and Ricardo's schemes demonstrated, the belief that the market is created and maintained by sovereign consumers is a form of methodological individualism (Therborn "Science" 108).

Neoclassical economics refined this model, basing its conception of social production on rational choice decisions based on individuals' utility maximization. This is not a neutral

226 or accurate depiction of economic interactions for most people, whose consumption patterns are socialized and standardized through culture and family. Rather, it describes

"one group in a capitalist economy: the functionless owner of a broad portfolio of investment assets... [who must make] perpetual marginal adjustments to his or her portfolio of assets" to maximize his or her income and rate of growth (Hunt 283). In a neat tautology, the behaviour of individuals within the market becomes an ideal model for how markets operate (Therborn "Science" 109). This myth allows an easy explanation for poverty or irrational economic decisions: market failures are due to the moral character of the individual, who is unable to make the proper marginal choices and abstain from present consumption in order to accumulate (Hunt 313).

The idea that humans are by nature greedy is reflected in current localist discourse. Human appetite is insatiable: Kingsolver observes, "[i]t is both extraordinary and unsympathetic in our culture to refrain from having everything one can afford" (35).

Schumacher calls for "people" to cut back: "as physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats than people depending upon a high rate of use" (42). McKibben goes further, reducing our social nature to a machine: "viewed in one way, modern Western human beings are flesh-colored devices for combusting coal and gas and oil" (15). Animals or machines, we are subhuman. These ideas are closely reflected in modern deep ecology, with its stringent criticism of industrial size, based on inherent human tendencies to expand. Its principles include anti-anthropocentrism, with a goal of far fewer humans on the earth, who have no right to change environmental

227 diversity to suit their own ends (de Steiguer 188). These pessimistic views compare with

Malthus' views on the restraint of the poor. Against their insatiable appetites, "human institutions... are mere feathers that float on the surface, in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs and render turbid the whole stream of human life" (Malthus qtd. in McNally "Against" 76). There is no hope for rational organization of human society.

The point of this socio-biology is to naturalize capitalist social relations, obliterating how poor people might have come to lack subsistence in the first place:

"history itself becomes a degrading monolith that swallows up all distinctions, mediations, phases of development, and social specificities. Capitalism and its contradictions are reduced to epiphenomena of an all-devouring civilization" (Bookchin

48).

Yet following Malthus, judgment of individual behaviour infuses petty bourgeois ideology with moralism. It is not only that the human species is wasteful but that our wastefulness is a moral failing: as Schumacher says, it "is the sin of greed that has delivered us over into the power of the machine." He cannot understand how higher standards of living do not quell "the frenzy of economism", and why "the rulers of rich societies", capitalist or Communist, do not create more humane forms of work (23).

The competitive drive inherent in capitalism creates the frenzy and exacerbates the alienation at the heart of degrading work, a state Marx identified even before he developed his critique of political economy (Marx "Economic" 110). However, non-

Marxists like Schumacher have no materialist explanation and can only fall back on "the

228 sin of greed." This is a useful image for the expansionist drive at the heart of capital, but it can at best only be a metaphor. As a concept it can be neither proven nor disproven, and using it as a motive for expansion substitutes idealism for a concrete analysis. The solution is no longer understanding capitalism to provide the exploited tools to free themselves but "moving towards saintliness" (24).

Generosity and selflessness may allow the humble to rest at night, but values cannot explain how an amoral system works, only its effects. Lacking an explanation, localists project their confusion outwards. Catastrophism and Malthusianism are not the logical conclusion of all localist politics; an aspiring member of the professional classes would have difficulty accumulating individually if she was fixated on failure and social breakdown. Rather, these are possible dystopias ingrained within localism, the logical binary of the utopianism localism espouses. Their purpose is not to make the localist give up on making homemade cheese, organizing a local credit cooperative or trading website development for wooden sculptures; rather, they provide an undercurrent of fear to motivate these changes, showing what will happen if localism is not introduced. In that, they correspond neatly to the petty bourgeois intermediate stratum, and a subconscious recognition of the powerlessness of individualized reproduction before both capital and labour.

Localist moralism: the locavore

Localist provides an individualized, moral basis for consumer sovereignty, and so when the localists are not listened to, consumers become the problem, not the solution.

When consumption rises to deal with stress of working lives, "much of it simply buys the

229 services that make it possible for us to work those long hours" (114). The capitalist imperative to increase labour productivity is turned into its opposite, a personal choice of workers. Schumacher disapproves of "complicated tailoring" and suggests clothing should be "the skillful draping of uncut material." Nor should anything else we need be

"anything ugly, shabby or mean" (41). Kingsolver calls the purchase of portable music players, high-speed internet, large vehicles and name brand clothing "categorically unnecessary purchases." For her, the radio is sufficient; therefore it is for everyone (115).

All of consumer culture is a form of "teenage boy culture" geared to flashy, unnecessary things (Norberg-Hodge qtd. in Kingsolver 406). Continuing the theme of adolescence,

Carrlson quotes Holmgren: '"our whole society is like a teenager who wants to have it all, have it now, without consequences.' A culture that simultaneously glorifies and fears adolescence while promoting a shallow hedonism is perfectly suited to the mass consumerism that underpins modern capitalism" (72). We are less than adults, thanks to our consumption choices.

A concrete example of moral judgment applied to lifestyle and consumption choices can be found in localist food politics. The petty bourgeoisie's judgments on food are steeped in class distinctions. Kingsolver is scathing about the food decisions of poor people: "we complain about the high price of organic meats and vegetables that might send back more than three nickels per buck to the farmers" (13). Meanwhile, "if many of us would view this style of eating [only what's in season locally] as deprivation, that's only because we've grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything, always" (65). She is adamant that everyone can choose good food, if they

230 make cooking a recreational activity (128). For those of us with free time, a "quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people" (129). The implicit judgment of urban workers is offset by an appeal to the good life; for the poor, "home-cooked, whole-ingredient cuisine will save money. It will also help trim off and keep off extra pounds" (130).

It is worthwhile noting the long history of social reformers trying to shape working class behaviour. In The Housing Question, Engels criticized how reformers reduced social ills to questions of personal morality. He did not minimize the horrible standards of living working class people endured; rather, he blamed their bad habits on that environment: "under existing circumstances drunkenness among the workers is an inevitable product of their living conditions, just as inevitable as typhus, crime, vermin, the bailiff and other social ills" (Part Two). Trying to educate workers to live better, through moral exhortation or "building model institutions," was a means to encourage artificial class harmony, through which workers would accept their circumstances rather than agitate for change. Fundamental class conflict could be avoided or educated out of existence, and the bourgeoisie could deflect blame for workers' living conditions.

Orwell criticized the public debate on how the unemployed might change what they ate to adjust to having lower incomes:

Would it not be better if [the poor] spent more money on wholesome

things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even... saved on fuel

231 and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary

human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being

would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the

peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you

feel to spend it on wholesome food.

The problem was not ignorance but the psychology of class:

When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed,

harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome

food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply

pleasant thing to tempt you.... That is how your mind works when you are

at the P.A.C. [social assistance] level. White bread-and-marg and sugared

tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people

think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment

is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated (86).

Orwell was entirely conscious that this was an "appalling diet" and that the results were "a physical degeneracy." He decried those who "pour muck like tinned milk down their throats and [do] not even know that it is inferior to the product of the cow", and he did not absolve "the modern industrial technique [of food production] which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything" (90; 88). This is echoed in the criticisms of fast food by localists today. To say these well meaning suggestions are valid from a nutritional and ecological perspective misses the point: the need for "cheaply pleasant things" suggests a significantly more complex social reality.

232 Food choices are a consequence, not a determinant of income: "[o]bservers tend to see a simple effect of income in the fact that, as one rises in the social hierarchy, the proportion of income spent on food diminishes, or that, within the food budget, the proportion spent on heavy, fatty, fattening foods, which are also cheap... declines... whereas an increasing proportion is spent on leaner, lighter (more digestible), non- fattening foods" (Bourdieu 177). This does not entirely explain the unhealthy food choices the locavores decry, because in many cases, "the same income is associated with totally different consumption patterns." However, the ultimate determinant is the class background of the consumer. Those "who are the product of material conditions of existence defined by distance from necessity" are able to enjoy "the tastes of luxury (or freedom)." Those whose lives are governed by need consume the "taste of necessity", what appears to fulfill that need. "Thus it is possible to deduce popular tastes for the foods that are simultaneously most 'filling' and most economical from the necessity of reproducing labour power at the lowest cost which is forced on the proletariat as its very definition" (177).

The freedom to eat good food is an expression of freedom from selling one's labour power as cheaply as possible. Those who pursue the taste of luxury are so accustomed to "absolute freedom of choice" that they cannot comprehend "the taste of necessity", whose consumers "have a taste for what they are anyway condemned to." The compulsion of wage-labour makes taste "a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice by the taste for the necessary" (178). Failure to grasp the fundamental contradiction of capital

233 leaves the localists posing their lifestyle as a moral choice. "For a dedicated non-cook, the first step is likely the hardest: convincing oneself it's worth the trouble in terms of health and household economy, let alone saving the junked-up world" (Kingsolver 129).

It is true this is the hardest choice, but only because "the taste for the necessary" does not come from a rural idyll where the "greatest rewards of living in an old farmhouse are the stories and the gardens" (44). For lack of an old farmhouse, "should anyone be tempted to ignore the complexity of the world and consume their food irresponsibly and unfairly, indifferent to social justice, I say that the fair has become indispensible" (Petrini 143).

Those who do not share the expectations (perceived as realizable) of class mobility are irresponsible and unfair. The complex process in which the production of value creates commodity fetishism, upon which the production of habitus and its determination of choice rests, is erased in favour of a nebulous and ever-present "culture", morality and laziness.

Food localism becomes the latest manifestation of "class racism." The working classes who buy pre-packaged food at grocery chains

are the people 'who don't know how to live', who sacrifice most to

material foods, and to the heaviest, grossest and most fattening of them,

bread, potatoes, fats, and the most vulgar... [and who] fling themselves

into the prefabricated leisure activities designed for them by the engineers

of cultural mass production; those who by all these uninspired 'choices'

confirm class racism... in its conviction that they only get what they

deserve (Bourdieu 179).

234 There is no difference in form between criticizing an unhealthy diet and criticizing one which does not originate from the proper, local place, except that the latter, as a moral obligation to the natural environment, is even further removed from the necessary choices of the working class. Even the localists acknowledge the limits of this strategy, without any explanation for those limits: when Small is Beautiful "was first published, many thought that change would come through insight, logic, compassion, and reason. Increasingly, it seems that change will come about after we have exhausted every other theory of greed and gain... That the world should become so immune to its own losses seemed inconceivable 25 years ago" (Hawkin, qtd. in Schumacher 12). "Greed and gain" rule the world despite the good intentions of Utopians:

The over-arching assumption of early adherents [of permaculture] seems

to have been a belief that by doing good work well, the rest of the society

would 'get it' and come along. After a quarter century the movement has

spread... But the dominant society hasn't lost its grip on the underlying

priorities, values, and decisions that shape global capitalism. If anything,

the rape of the planet is proceeding at a faster pace than ever (Carrlson 74)

This heartfelt passage captures the hopelessness of those opposing global capital with worthy, moral projects. Bourdieu suggests that the petty bourgeois can become disillusioned when their personal sacrifices create "repressive pessimism as they grow older and as the future which made sense of their sacrifice turns sour" (352). This can result in either catastrophism or, more commonly, the disapproval of poor, uneducated consumers. The judgment of individual consumer choices forms a complex of taste and

235 morality, allowing localists to imply that the majority of people are to blame for the destruction of human community and the earth.

Petty Bourgeois hegemony

Engels theorized that, due to the development of large-scale industry and consequent organization of the proletariat, the Utopians were "now wholly belonging to the past" (Engels). However, writing with the benefit of hindsight, Draper cautions that

"[a]bstract dogmatizing about the future has enjoyed bursts of popularity throughout the history of the socialist movement, especially when coteries of intellectuals entered the movement, not on a wave of class struggle but because of intolerable alienation from the realities of the status quo" ("Karl Marx's" 21). This condition appears to be fulfilled today, as the numerous examples of alienation by the localists attest to. Yet if the limited goals of the petty bourgeoisie are so truncated, and so transparently from a vacillating, unstable class, it remains to be explained how localism achieved such staying power among progressives today. It appears that other classes have indeed taken up the banner of the petty bourgeoisie. Gramsci's analysis of hegemony, as a product of a class coalition, helps explain how the weakness of working class movements has allowed petty bourgeoisie ideas to come to prominence.

Hegemony is the consent, active or passive, to the rule of the powerful. This takes place through the fluid interaction between state and civil society, the boundaries of which are constantly changing (Eagleton 208). Hegemony uses ideology to achieve consent of the governed without the systemic use of physical force (114). It is shaped by intellectuals with an organic relationship to their class: they "give [their class]

236 homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields" (Gramsci 5). Organic intellectuals bridge the gap between a class's role in the capitalist division of labour, and its consciousness of that role, through playing an active part in social life in the institutions of a class (Eagleton 119).

During capitalist crisis, previously stable hegemonies are shaken. Failing an acute confrontation between labour and capital, classes vie for power but none can achieve dominance (Gramsci 216). The political terrain of struggle proves resistant to easy victories: "even during the great economic crises... [a] crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organize with lightning speed in time and space" (235). An extended campaign to prepare civil society for the ideas of a particular class must take place first, what Gramsci calls a war of position (238).

Gramsci concurs with Bourdieu that the necessity to accumulate individually shapes the ideas of the petty bourgeois, but he goes further to suggest they have a unique role to play in a war of position by becoming intellectuals: "[s]trata have grown up which traditionally 'produce' intellectuals and these strata coincide with those which have specialized in 'saving', i.e. the petty and middle landed bourgeoisie and certain strata of the petty and middle urban bourgeoisie" (11). They provide the theoretical framework for the dominant classes through technical, managerial and ideological work. However, petty bourgeois intellectuals can achieve hegemony themselves during a disintegration of the ruling order, when classes no longer recognize the parties that have traditionally represented them (210). Marxists concur that the petty bourgeoisie is riven with contradictions, cannot represent a coherent class interest, and thus a petty bourgeois war

237 of position is a contradiction in terms. However, this does not foreclose the possibility of petty bourgeois intellectuals asserting internally inconsistent ideologies, as the class is drawn in different ideological directions. Today, neoliberalism has silenced the organic intellectuals of the working class, while neoliberalism's crisis has opened up space outside the dominant capitalist triumphalism. The decline of working class hegemony has created the space for localism to dominate the class strategies of the petty bourgeoisie.

Seeing no overt class struggle, the petty bourgeoisie simply ignores the working class or, when it considers its presence at all, is forced to theorize it away. Carrlson sees in the "erosion of class subjectivity" a positive change towards "an egalitarian sensibility that assumes equal rights and equal opportunities", allowing more flexible identities to define them in multiple ways, "least of all what they do for money" (13). There have been Marxist responses to this kind of criticism that reassert the continued existence and centrality of the working class (Camfield "Multitude" 2007). Recognizing the compulsion of wage labour is not an assault on what Carrlson calls our "full complexity as people": it is a criticism of the exploitation that prevents workers' full complexity from emerging. However, in identifying ideology, what makes localism interesting is not only its dismissal of working class agency, but its idea that the violent boundaries placed on self-definition can be overcome through force of will, a simple adoption of "hybrid identities." Autonomous individuals pursuing rational self-interest must internalize power relations: a "shift from coercion to consent is implicit in the very material conditions of middle-class society" (Eagleton "Ideology" 116). This form of voluntarism marks localism as a product of the petty bourgeoisie. Its methodological individualism is the

238 unifying spool around which the disparate threads of petty bourgeois ideology wind.

The prominence of localism today is not due to the intellectual rigour of petty bourgeois ideology, nor necessarily to the power of the new petty bourgeoisie embodied in recent occupational shifts. Instead, the decline in hegemony of traditional working class movements has created an ideological space for localism. Bourdieu describes a

"new ethic espoused by the vanguard of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie [which] is perfectly compatible with a form of enlightened conservatism." Localism becomes the ideological complement to the idea of consumer sovereignty, because that ethic's

most important contribution... may well be that it produces consumers

who are isolated... and therefore free (or forced) to confront in extended

order the separate markets... of the new economic order and untrammelled

by the constraints and brakes imposed by collective memories and

expectations - in short, freed from the temporal structures imposed by

domestic units, with their own life-cycle, their long-term 'planning'... and

their collective defences against the immediate impact of the market

(Bourdieu 371).

Today, the new petty bourgeoisie has sensed the lack of collective "constraints and brakes." Since the individual production, circulation and coordination of commodities is its primary economic activity, the petty bourgeoisie generalizes its accumulation strategies in localist ideology. In the place of historical traditions of class struggle, localism's voluntarist ethos is optimistic about the impact of small lifestyle choices. Its promotion of voluntary simplicity fits with localism's criticism of size and

239 provides the moral basis to judge working class behaviours and appetites. Lifestyle promotion, as a form of utopianism, results from the petty bourgeoisie's inability to resolve the capitalist contradictions it labours under. Darker streaks of catastrophism and

Malthusianism infuse it with a sense of urgency when necessary.

Since localism comes from the life practices of an intermediate class, it does not consider the alternative that Marx drew from the nature of the proletariat: collective struggle to replace capitalism.

240 CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICS OF LOCALISM

Localism fails to understand how capitalism works as a system governed by tendencies to centralization and crisis. Its confusion is a product of its historical context: as part of the neoliberal defeat of Keynesianism, capital has promoted nonmarket socialization in local spaces. Localism is a form of neocommunitarianism, promoting local social economy measures that lessen the burden of workers' reproduction on capital. Local development schemes are themselves embedded in and thus severely limited by the global economy.

These limitations are reflected in the political alternatives of localism.

Postcapitalist theorists suggest that it is possible to create viable spaces outside of capital, and this is expressed concretely through Solidarity Economics. These theories fail to acknowledge the structural constraints placed upon labour and end up adopting the principles of neoclassical economics. Despite having strong critiques of the capitalist state, localist schemes such as Participatory Economics can lead to abstract prefigurative experiments, rather than recognizing advantages in democratic planning and collective resistances.

Local spaces remain vital locations of class struggle against capitalism, and this poses particular tasks for conceptualizing worker agency. The notion of capitalism as contradictory, containing multiple historical possibilities based on its ability to socialize labour and the means of production, can be rescued from Eurocentric stageist views of development. Rosa Luxemburg's theorizing of the relation between social reforms and revolution provides a useful way to understand how capitalist economy structures the

241 potential for political action, and this model can be applied to some concrete applications of local class struggle. Participatory Budgeting shows how the localist agenda of radical participation faces the limits of extra-local political economy; in contrast, the recent

Special Diet campaign in Ontario demonstrates how oppositional movements can achieve concrete social reforms while mobilizing the poor. The Ontario Days of Action in the

1990s show the potential for building mass social resistance to neoliberal austerity. The global justice movement provides a link between the two, connecting local reforms to an anticapitalist analysis that encourages activist capacities to theorize and act against capitalist political rule. If localism cannot conceive of either how capitalism works or how to change it, local spaces are still vital to creating a socialist movement that challenges, restricts and transforms the rule of capital.

The limits of distributional reform

Some localists recognize that capital has a lot of power. For example, when economists Bellows and Hamm argue for local democratic control over the food supply, they recognize this involves "economic democracy", which is impossible without addressing "the principle of accumulation of wealth" and "challeng(ing) systemic inequities." This means local food strategies must be considered part of "[evaluating the procedural state of economic democracy." They recognize that simply devising economic schemes - even according to evaluative criteria like stewardship capacities and energy inputs - does not address systemic barriers. But they offer no way to challenge those inequities beyond "conscious public framing" (279).

Similarly, ecological economists Daly and Farley have trouble conceptualizing

242 how far property rights should extend. They acknowledge that sources of raw materials are privately owned, while sinks into which waste is disposed of are public, and thus

Directly controlling sources (depletion) involves more interference with

existing property rights than controlling sink access. To socialize all

resource ownership after resources are privately owned is revolutionary.

To socialize the unowned sink, the atmosphere, and then charge a

dumping fee seems less threatening to private property than a direct

control over the amount extracted. But to control emissions is to dam the

river at its widest point, contrary to the principle that it is easier to dam it

at its narrowest point. Should we advocate revolution then? (368)

But they do not advocate revolution, instead suggesting property rights that "can belong to individuals, communities, the state, the global community, or no one" (371).

Since property is a measure of control over capital, this would mean ending the rule of capital, a truly revolutionary policy ill-served by their claim that the "search for suitable policies neither can nor should be limited only to those that require private property rights" (371). They approach the question of capitalist power and then back away.

These distortions arise from viewing capitalism as a series of exchange relations.

As Chapter One demonstrated, this allows productive relations to remain historically fixed and then determines how those categories are arranged. The limits to capital become external and arbitrary, based on the personal preference of consumers or, for

Smithian socialists, the state of the class struggle. Either way, capital is dehistoricized and made abstract, opening space for a politics based on desire and voluntarism. Instead,

243 emancipatory politics must be rooted in an understanding of the relationship between "the material bases of the relative class forces" (Murray "Part One" 117). Today, the material basis of capital arises out of the historical context of neoliberalism.

The rise of neoliberalism

All Marxisms reject the functionalist conceptualization of the state as a neutral tool for the management and distribution of resources (Barker). Rather, the state is a set of institutions that accomplishes two major tasks. First, the private sphere of production and circulation is so vast that no individual owner or firm can control it, and thus the capitalist class cedes direct authority to a government. The fact that a government can act against individual capitals in no way lessens its function as an instrument of capitalist rule (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 479). It is inherent in the market for capitals to compete and that competition cannot be allowed to disrupt the overall circuit of accumulation.

However, fractions of the capitalist class will advocate on their own behalf.

Representative systems like parliament are an ideal avenue for different fractions of capital to form parties to protect their interests (480).

Second, the state manages and suppresses the contradictions inherent in a society where the minority exploits the labour power of the majority. The state guarantees private property rights, assuaging threats to it either through direct repression via the police and military, or integration through the provision of social welfare and ideological measures

(475). The need to establish and maintain control heightens as greater numbers of workers get drawn into the socialization of production (Luxemburg "Reform" 85). Today the state assumes many of the costs of technological innovation, infrastructure creation

244 and renewal, educating and training, and the socialization of potential losses in many different productive sectors, including the subsidization of key industries (Mandel "Late

Capitalism" 484). This can only proceed so far: too much intervention might demonstrate to society at large the state's function of regulating capital accumulation, calling into question both the state itself and the existence of a private market (487).

This is a good way to conceptualize neoliberalism: as a reaction against state efforts to integrate and socialize the working class. The Keynesianism that neoliberalism replaced arose in the post-war compromise: capital provided a near-universal social wage, while labour maintained capital's right to accumulate. But Keynesianism only worked while it provided more jobs to produce more consumer goods. The fundamental political contradiction of capitalism - its inability to allow democratic governance over production at all stages - was never addressed (Albo "Obstacles" 36). Keynesianism declined under the combined pressures of overaccumulation and class struggle (Zuege

98). Faced by twin dangers of stagnation and inflation that rising productivity and class struggle caused in the 1970s, the state moved to restore conditions for profitability (Albo

"Neoliberalism" 3).

Writing at the beginning of this process over 30 years ago, Mandel showed how growth ground to a halt as international competition intensified, yet the pressures to centralize capital continued unabated. To make profits rise in this context, the rate of surplus value had to increase still further ("Late Capitalism" 341). This is what happened: capital offloaded the costs of reproduction onto the working class by lowering both formal and social wages.

245 Neoliberal urbanism and local spaces

Neoliberalism does not look the same everywhere. However, this does not validate the claim that Marxists analytically blur local and national governments (M.

Smith 76). Neoliberalism is an extra-local project, something "[ejxcessively concrete and contingent analyses of neoliberal strategies" miss (Peck and Tickell 382). The very fact that neoliberalism changes appearance demonstrates connections between its theory and practice, "tracking] actual patterns and practices of neoliberal restructuring, and... mak[ing] meaningful part-whole connections between localized and institutionally specific instances of reform and the wider discourses and ideologies of neoliberalism"

(396). An understanding of the transformation of local, urban spaces illuminates neoliberalism itself.

As late as 1987, an urban theorist could write that "over time the public realm has assumed a progressively greater responsibility for social functions that were carried out in the past by more personalized aspects of private life" (Gottdiener 100). This suggests that neoliberalism took time: it was not simply a move to reprivatize aspects of social life. It is still true that capital has "assignfed] to the State an increasingly greater role in the direct management of society and the quality of everyday life" (100). However, while it maintains tight control over national policy like trade and military matters, neoliberal discipline has shifted aspects of its control towards the local, urban level.

Keynesian social policy took an activist approach to the local: "while local problems were conceptualized as the product of local and non-local forces, their solution was seen as a matter of central government responsibility through a combination of

246 spatially targeted and generic (e.g. welfare) policies" (Amin 613). Neoliberals criticized

Keynesian institutions, "recitfing] problems of cumbersome bureaucracy, a passive citizenry, and an impoverished group politics" (Gottdiener 94,101). The problems

Keynesianism set out to solve became its fault: institutions large enough to impact society were too big to function properly, and poverty became an outcome of state intervention. Against dehumanizing institutions, neoliberal governance claimed to recapture "cultural and political modes of association... [and] democratic political culture." The answer was a renewed emphasis on the free market in local, urban spaces:

"[s]patial inequality" was redefined "as a problem of local origin in need of entrepreneurial resolution" (Amin 613). The scale of the problem and solution reversed:

"the local [was] re-imagined as the cause, consequence, and remedy of social and spatial inequality" (614).

Capital needs to collectivize the conditions in which it accumulates, and cities help in two important ways: reducing capital circulation time, and providing local, non- market social coordination such as informal, intergenerational workforce training (Gough and Eisenschitz 183). The globalization of production has made cities even more important; yet it also exacerbated the contradiction between capital's ever-larger production scale and the highly specialized knowledge and labour power necessary to support it (Smith "New Globalism" 434). Keynesianism could not provide this kind of coordination efficiently; in response, neoliberalism assigned a new, creative role to the urban locality, "unleashing] the benefits of increased social dynamism by improving the flow of information, commitment, and trust within expanding social networks" (94).

247 As Keynesian national state intervention experienced a "rollback", new forms of regional and local governance had a "rollout." Jessop calls this process

"neocommunitarianism": grassroots mobilizations for economic development in the non- market, non-state social economy (463,454). This bore superficial similarities to

Keynesian state strategies, which also promoted the social economy while defunding more oppositional groups (Zuege 102). However, neoliberal policy makers restricted themselves to supply-side stimulus. They rolled back the social wage, and put funds towards re-training the unemployed to work on urban regeneration, integrating diverse community groups into local economies and regional state and business interests (Jessop

463). This helped maintain labour discipline and promoted the knowledge economies needed to service technological change (412).

Misunderstanding the point of this process, some localists have placed faith in the power of municipal governments to purchase locally made products and promote local economic development (Roberts "The Way" 40). Chapter Three showed the limitations of this strategy for urban agriculture; however, more broadly, neoliberalism imposes strict limits on what can be accomplished at the local level. First, the threat of capital flight limits the possibilities for local governments to create anti-neoliberal infrastructures of social coordination, particularly in smaller locales (Gough 407). Local spaces must adapt themselves to global circuits of investment, production and accumulation, which operate well beyond the scale of the local. Neoliberalism sets cities competing against each other to attract capital, in the process "actively facilitating and subsidizing the very geographic mobility that first rendered them vulnerable" (Peck "Geography" 393). An

248 environment of capital flight reinforces "an extremely narrow urban-policy repertoire based on capital subsidies, place promotion, [labour market] supply-side intervention, central-city makeovers, and local boosterism" (395).

Second, lasting local development is not simply about having the correct policy, but about creating entire institutional cultures over time. These form complex systems that go well beyond social enterprise to include "'favourable' regulatory standards, tax burdens, wage rates, and working hours... [and] an 'appropriate' work ethic and managerial culture" (Zuege 103). Successful local development needs relative wealth, institutional capacity and "a proactive middle class" as a prerequisite; likewise, individual success in these schemes depends on participants' own material, social and cultural wealth. Community involvement "is rarely a pathway to formal employment or entrepreneurship among the socially excluded" (Amin 622). Community mobilization depends on improving material circumstances, social connectivity and the wellbeing of residents first; the de-industrialized working class cannot create these factors from nothing (630). These conditions cannot be created in all localities: the existence of a sympathetic local government, community activists, rootless entrepreneurs and funding bodies all depend on extra-local factors (Amin 621). Without them, the social economy stagnated and local development strategies are implemented top-down.

For example, Spain's Mondragon cooperative is often cited as a successful example of the social economy (Community Economies Collective 25). However, Spain has a long history of "other agents of civic engagement." The Basque region in which the

Mondragon is based is culturally autonomous, has been a centre for manufacturing since

249 the late nineteenth century and receives high levels of state financing within a federated system of three provincial governments (Santisteban 29). Meanwhile, it still has to adapt to neoliberal pressures, responding to European Union regulation and external market pressures to adapt its business practices and technologies to free-market competitors

(Gunn 7). To be successful, anti-neoliberal local development must begin to change whole systems of production, distribution and socialization.

Third, neoliberalism has replaced an expectation of a social wage with "a conformist civic particularism, one that expects collective action from communities in particular places and for highly instrumental ends" (Amin 615). This complicates the idea that good governments are held back by bad, big capital. Rather, governments have taken an active role in using local spaces to co-opt working class opposition and rollback the social wage (Amin 615; Gough and Eisenschitz 186; Zuege 105). For example, in the recent recession, massive amounts of state spending combined with cutbacks to the social wage (McNally "Global Economy"; CCPA Newsroom). For neoliberalism, these crises provide the basis for the growth of the social economy to replace state functions (Jessop

467).

Individual state policies can, of course, achieve progressive reforms; however, they exist as part of the project of class integration, whatever the motivations of policy­ makers. State institutions, Keynesian or neoliberal, local or national, are fundamentally conservative, not only from bureaucratic inertia but because their purpose is to slow and redirect energies which might otherwise threaten their existence. A state expert can only pose partial, non-systemic solutions to social problems; otherwise she will be replaced

250 (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 496). Broad social reforms have historically only been offered by the government reluctantly under pressure of those mass social movements

(Burgess).

These limitations suggest that the state's job is to manage accumulation, not to act as a tool to ameliorate the worst effects of capitalist development. This undercuts localism's functionalist view of local government as a tool to implement autonomous local change.

Postcapitalist localism

The decentralization of state power, and local, nonmarket socialization does not

"challenge... the wisdom... that market forces provide the best means to satisfy human wants and desires" (Jessop 467). However, localism insists that local economic organization can prefigure a non-commodified economy and focuses on creating micro- alternatives to transcend or out-compete capitalist institutions.

In the 1970s, Marxist-Feminists criticized classical Marxism's bifurcation between the formal production of value and the informal realm of reproduction. Much economic activity goes unaccounted for in analyses that focus strictly on production.

Value gets created in private spaces outside the formal, public realm, such as nannies and other domestic labourers. This means that the home and community, and not just the workplace, can be sites for anti-capitalist struggle (Barton 24).

This insight is taken up by poststructuralist economists J.K. Gibson-Graham, who suggest that neoclassical and Marxist economics subordinate local "non-capitalist" activities to global production (Miller "Other"; Gibson-Graham "Beyond" 4). The global

251 is a singular realm, but the local is a diverse site of people's actual activities. In reality

"the global does not exist, or at least not in any stable and generic relation to other scales.

Scratch anything 'global' and you find locality" (9). All production and reproduction happens somewhere local. Therefore "the local and the global are not fixed entities, but are contingently produced, always in the process of being re-produced and never completed" (10). Global and local differ depending on the direction they are viewed from. The power of the local can be reclaimed once we "argue for the unfixity and multiple meanings attached to [global and local], and resituate them as processes whose courses are unknown and potentially malleable" (10).

Gibson-Graham blame the theorists of globalization themselves, and not the processes they describe, for downplaying the local. For example, they cite a feminist who says the feminist movement fails to oppose capitalism sufficiently. By measuring feminism and a totalizing system like capitalism by the same gauge, she becomes an

"unwitting coconspirator" with globalization who suffers from "paranoia" ("Imagining"

74). By suggesting the power of capital is all-encompassing, the feminist is committing

"epistemological realism." Instead, capitalism must be represented "as uneven, fragile, and less extensive than imagined" in order to "imagine, act, and claim new spaces of intervention." The "less singular and solid analysis of power" of poststructuralism enables feminists to "enact... postcapitalist futures." (74).

The emphasis on fragility is important, not from any assessment of the balance of forces between capital and labour, but because of how helpless it makes us feel. As

Holloway suggests, "radical theory tends to focus on oppression and the struggle against

252 oppression, rather than on the fragility of that oppression" ("Change The World" 176).

This can provoke a sense of hopelessness; however, viewing capitalism as fragile creates

"a new kind of dispersed collective action that [does] not depend upon the organized revolutionary agendas of more established radical politics" (Gibson-Graham "Imagining"

75). The collective action is, first of all, discursive: "noncapitalism needed to be released from its location in a capitalocentric discourse in which already existing economic alternatives are seen as no different from capitalism, supporting or shoring up capitalism, or so opposed as to be Utopian and thus unrealizable." This process takes the form of

"language politics... a new, richer language of the diverse (not exclusively capitalist) economy", including gift and caring economies (75). Freed of capitalocentric discourse, poststructuralists can find places "where alternative cooperative and intentional economic activities coexist with multinational capitalism" (76).

Having abandoned systemic analysis, Gibson-Graham can now look for

"noncapitalist imaginaries." Despite the end of the global/local binary, all the practices they find are local. In a deindustrialized region of Australia, they sponsor researchers to visit the unemployed with the aim of breaking their binary mindset. The researchers cannot say they are from the university, which would provoke anger at state institutions:

"that would lead back to the evils of the... conservative state government, and ultimately the Economy." Gibson-Graham call this "the narrative of 'our' victimization at the hands of 'them'." Moving beyond us vs. them takes the form of suggesting to one unemployed

"political" man, bitterly angry at the industrial policies that led to his unemployment, that he start a group giving free car maintenance classes. No longer trapped, "he has moved

253 toward pleasure and happiness associated with a different economic way to be... positioning] him as skillful and giving, and endowed with an economic identity within a community economy" (63). In a similar vein, the researchers suggest that the local unemployed are no longer without options, but are a "resource" themselves because they spend their unemployment benefits locally (59). Once the workers have abandoned "the

State, Capitalism, and Power" as categories, they can form a "micropolitical opportunity... that call[s] the naturalness or sufficiency of one's own identity into question" (64). That new identity is based on simple acts of generosity: "a meal that was consumed by its producers [created] unwitting involvement in the practice of collectivity" (65). Together the unemployed workers form "the hopeful subject - a left subject on the horizon of social possibility" (71).

Gibson-Graham make a number of assumptions, equating a systemic analysis with philosophical structuralism which, in turn, is supposed to buttress capitalist ideology. For them, a recognition of totality equals an acceptance that one is powerless before that totality. The micro is both descriptive and normative, as the primary scale of economic activity and thus alternatives. Gibson-Graham are aware of broad social structures, they simply choose to ignore them. They argue: "It seems to us that a politics of the local (an anti-globalization politics that is not simply 'grassroots globalization') will go nowhere without subjects who can experience themselves as free from capitalist globalization" ("Beyond" 14). But this form of subjectivity is precisely what capitalism makes impossible. Capital itself is capitalocentric, acting well beyond the local. The

American Federal Reserve and a community garden federation are not equally powerful;

254 volunteer farmers cannot close down the government that subsidizes their agribusiness competitors. Gibson-Graham claim that "local initiatives can be broadcast to the world and adopted in multiple places across space.... And global processes always involve localization—the arrival of the McDonald's outlet on the next block, the local link-up to cable TV, the building of a factory on customary owned land" (10). McDonald's outlets, cable TV and factories do not simply arrive in one locality rather than another: they are embedded in a constellation of social relations in varied geographical space, at the root of which is capital's drive to accumulate. The very localization of those global processes causes crises when governments respond to international market conditions and implement local neoliberal austerity measures (Stilwell 23).

It is those processes of contradictory expansion, and not a discourse of victimization, that caused the anger of the hapless "political" man Gibson-Graham encountered. They ask, "If we viewed the economic landscape as imperfectly colonized, homogenized, systematized, might we not find openings for projects of noncapitalist invention?" (Miller "Other"). The answer is no. In a market economy, the unemployed man cannot maintain a viable livelihood by giving away skills for free, nor can his neighbours by making meals together. It does not follow that, simply because resistance exists outside traditional workplaces, the reproductive sphere is automatically a site of that resistance. As Cockburn suggests, viewing work and home separately repeats the separation capital itself makes: the ruling class also needs the working class to be reproduced, materially and ideologically (165). Capital also needs the family and caring professions, and ceasing to make demands on it would not liberate the realm of

255 reproduction. Rather, capital could land in regions, strip their resources and leave once they were exhausted. It would remove reproduction from capital's balance sheet, but not labour's, creating "a real reserve army for the lower end of the labour market" (Gough

421), Yet this is called "a requisite part of the larger political process of enacting a diverse regional economy" (Gibson-Graham "Imagining" 64).

Gibson-Graham's vision of a "diverse economy" is ultimately apolitical. Faced with the power of capital to destroy localities, they offer a tautology: "[w]e can resist the view that co-optation automatically happens in the vicinity of power... through the vigilant ethical practice of not being co-opted" ("Imagining" 77). Who has the privilege to remove themselves from the capital-labour relation that brings so much power to bear on local, regional and national economies? Gibson-Graham do. Luxemburg castigates those would who adopt "the morality of the bourgeoisie... the reconciliation with the existing order and the transfer of hope to the beyond of an ethical ideal-world" ("Reform"

127). Gibson-Graham's ethical ideal is another way to achieve reconciliation with the existing order.

Solidarity Economics

This compromise becomes clear when examining an application of left-localism:

Solidarity Economics (SE). This perspective recognizes the damage caused by neoliberalism: "What really sustains us when the factories shut down, when the floodwaters rise, or when the paycheck is not enough? In the face of failures of market and state, we often survive by self-organized relationships of care, cooperation, and community" (Miller "Other"). But its solution is not to fight for a bigger paycheque or to

256 open factories, but to deepen "relationships of care." SE recognizes that ethical business and cooperatives "have barely a prayer... [of] replacing] capitalist enterprise simply through successful growth and competition" and cannot "out-compete" capital (Miller

"Our"). However, Miller maintains that one can "play the capitalist game as it now stands" through worker cooperatives that support transformative social movements

("Other") and even "achieve victories" denied to the radical left.

A premise the radical left has apparently missed deserves to be examined in depth: Miller advocates an ecosystem vision of the economy, in which natural resources, production, exchange and consumption are part of "a cyclical whole." Even investment is transformed into "the recycling of surplus" ("Other"). Unlike Marx's vision of capital circulation, this cycle rests on biological, not social premises. Production is simply

"human transformation of resources into goods and services." Investment is no longer a battle to realize above-average profits but simply "the recycling of surplus."

Here is a contradiction. There is no mention of profit, just like in the neoclassical theory of equilibrium, in which "[w]ages are the return to labor's contribution and interest is the return to capital's contribution... all income results from payments of the necessary costs of production. There is no residual; there is no surplus; and there is no profit" (Hunt 305). A holistic economy is also a balanced economy, where inputs equal outputs. The neoclassical model agrees: "if each factor is paid the value of its marginal product, then these factor payments exactly exhaust the value of the total output... Each person receives the value of what his factor produces, and there is no surplus for anyone to expropriate" (Hunt 304). Yet Miller still finds a surplus; its existence, in a society

257 where the means of production are not controlled by the working class, means exploitation: this is precisely why neoclassical economics had to do away with surplus

(barring marginal returns) and create the concept of equilibrium in the first place. That

Miller brings it back, with no explanation of its source or how it fits into a steady-state ecological model, shows how contradictory SE is.

It follows that SE, like neoclassical economics, does away with classes and class struggle. Socialist politics is seen as "simply... advocating for alternative institutions of production." In another contradiction, after criticizing socialist economism, Miller proposes his own version: "[appropriate to this holistic picture, movements working for a just and democratic economy must generate interventions - and link these interventions together - at every point of the economic cycle" (Miller "Our"). Since the economy is no longer a site of power or politics, a strategic focus for interventions no longer matters.

Miller does speculate that "capitalism's dominance may, in fact, derive in no small part from its ability to co-opt and colonize [non-market] relationships of cooperation and mutual aid." But rather than investigate who, exactly, is being co-opted and colonized,

SE turns away from capital to find "existing economic practices - often invisible or marginal to the dominant lens - that foster cooperation, dignity, equity, self- determination, and democracy" (Miller "Other"). In an epistemological leap that is never explained, these values arise naturally from "organizing across the entire economic ecosystem and building a broader social movement." This is defined as creating

"reliable... solidarity markets" for goods and services produced by worker cooperatives, which move from "entering markets" to constructing them (Miller "Our").

258 How can tiny organizations, democratically-run or not, construct markets already constructed and occupied by capital? The answer is localism: the space of the local allows margins that capital overlooks. In an admission that somehow has no bearing on the entire theory, Miller allows that "it is not easy work, of course - especially considering the demands placed on -worker-owners by a cut-throat competitive market - but it is the work that we as cooperators must embrace if we choose to believe that another economy, and another world, is possible" (Emphasis added). The ultimate answer to a capitalist marketplace many times bigger than its alternatives is faithful to Gibson-

Graham's voluntarist tautology: it works because "we choose to believe" that it works. A

"cut-throat competitive market" may impose its own discipline - but not in our heads.

The real world imposes far more limits, as even a radical localist like Carrlson recognizes: "[e]fforts to break away, to create islands of Utopia (be it socialism in one state, or co-ops, collectives, and other smaller-scale social alternatives) have always flourished on the margins of capitalist society, but never to the extent that a radically different way of living has been able to supplant market society's daily life" (Carrlson 8).

This is clearest when SE advocates propose actual intervention schemes.

Solidarity Economics and labour

It is significant that, in choosing to ally itself with progressive causes, SE targets labour and attempts to smuggle in neoclassical economics under the guise of mutualism.

SE begins with an ostensibly radical critique: "[trade] unionists and cooperators alike, with a few notable exceptions, have lost sight of their critique of capitalism and their calls for liberation from the wage relationship" (Stolarski). Yet "The working class possesses

259 everything we need to create wealth and social prosperity in our own interest." The crisis in trade unionism is due not to years of deindustrialization and anti-labour laws, but an oversight. Neither unions nor cooperatives are "in a position to take on the market domination of Capital." This, however, is irrelevant, as SE provides "a weed and seed project designed to uproot the unjust power dynamics of Capitalism and replace it, enterprise by enterprise, with creatively organized cooperatives that serve the needs of people." Local cooperatives will eat into a well-established capitalist market through an arithmetic adding-up of local successes: "[i]nnovative practices at the micro level" will be "structurally effective for social change" by creating "always-broader collaborative networks and solidarity chains" (Arruda qtd. in Miller "Other"). Unions and cooperatives can form partnerships: the union can use the co-op to help organize industries while the co-op can use the skills and dues-base of the union to "maximize competitive advantage... efficiency and increase revenue in the competitive market" (Stolarski).

Neoclassical assert that capital and labour are simply factors of production, not the result of exploitation (Hunt 304). It follows that workers can become capitalists simply by amassing enough money and investing, and in Stolarski's model, this is precisely how co-ops will grow. While nothing is guaranteed, "if jobs are created" then the unionized workers get them. If the cooperative is profitable, unions will get more funds. SE is supposed to create a virtuous circle: with no shareholders to pay, workers' wages will rise while the firm saves money. Cooperatives grow by being able to reduce employment and increasing workers' bargaining power, even for workers outside the cooperative (Stolarski).

260 In this model there is no compulsion to exceed average profit rates, which would undercut any attempts to escape "competitive advantage." Workers must profit in a market controlled by capital far vaster than any individual cooperatives. The capitalist firm remains for the union to organize, and it is unburdened by these restrictions. It has a far vaster pool of educated workers to draw upon and a far greater pool of capital to invest and, if necessary, undersell the cooperative. Capital's shareholders are not parasitical: they provide the credit necessary to keep pace with technological change and, more importantly, to out-invest competitors. According to SE, even without outside investment sources a network of firms can absorb so much surplus labour "that unionists in the given industry are able to maintain bargaining leverage", and buy firms that capitalists themselves have written off. However, unemployment is not solely a function of bad investment decisions, but of the disconnect between production and realization inherent in a market economy. "Competing capitalist enterprises" have another option besides bankruptcy: they can draw on - and widen - the reserve army of labour.

It is true that the law of value does not coerce all workers the same way. Marx called producer cooperatives contradictory examples of new forms of socialized labour: in these, workers own factories and shops and decide democratically how production is organized. Marx thought that cooperatives based on factory production, using credit relations to extend their operations, were "transitional forms" that resolve the capital- labour "antagonism... positively" ("Capital Volume Three" 572). Between private and shared ownership, their democratic management showed "how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one." He did not suggest that they could overturn the law of

261 value, just that they provided the power of a good example.

However, cooperatives also make workers discipline themselves to produce according to prices set by the market, even if, as individual production units, they do not wish to follow those rules. More soberly, Soviet economist Preobrazhensky placed them within the global market, suggesting that they do not create new forms of production and exchange. Rather, they are simply "small islands not of social but of collective-group ownership of the instruments of production," tolerated "in the sea of capitalist relations only in so far as they are so subordinated" (218). One can swim in a sea but not drain it.

It does not matter whether co-operatives form in the departments of production or consumption: each form is "subordinated to all the laws of capitalist exchange" and can, at most, redistribute a small portion of profit (219). This is what prompts Hahnel to argue that the successes of worker-owned enterprise are always measured against the ruthless cost-cutting of capitalist enterprise: "The vision of reversing who hires whom - instead of capital hiring labor, labor hires capital - by slowly expanding the employee-owned sector of modern capitalist economies is a Utopian pipe dream" ("Economic" 350). Even

Carrlson, as an anarcho-localist, warns against placing false hopes in cooperatives:

countless co-ops and collectivized small businesses have flourished and

collapsed over the past century. The notion that a self-managed business,

whether co-operatively structured or as a collective comprised of equally

responsible members, can escape the ruthless logic of capitalism, is a

persistent dream of people who create these alternative structures (178).

The weaknesses of SE can be demonstrated by showing its interchangeability

262 with a completely non-labour-focused strategy: Shuman's Small-Mart Revolution, which scales up his small-business economy to include the entire world. He states that global poverty can be reduced through partnerships with Global South communities to help them transform agriculture away from export to staple crops: "[y]ou might send technical support people to work with your partners' communities, or bring their leaders here for training" (214). Micro-financing and new networks of independent businesses with their own distribution networks can create a new economic order: "[fjlexible manufacturing networks of locally owned entities can be... [strong enough to] buy out chain stores and reorganize them into global networks of locally owned businesses" (216). Exactly like

SE, small business will expand and, due to the superior use-values of its grassroots networking, overcome economies of scale.

This is the petty bourgeois view of capitalism: we are all small-scale entrepreneurs whose business models can be expanded indefinitely. We are empowered as consumers and, most importantly, as business-owners, and Shuman cites Switzerland as a country "where many small businesses control the nation's economic power" and encourage "community self-reliance" (217). As with SE, there is no struggle to control resources, which can be redistributed according to a different technical model. Credit is a neutral tool of resource allocation, not of capitalist expansion.

Stolarski and Shuman's geometric growth model of small or union-supported firms rests on a neoliberal assumption: that niche markets protect producers from pressures to achieve SNALT. However, "this fallacy rests on a truncated understanding of the competitive process, and a limited appreciation of the contemporary integration

263 and mobility of capital across sectors and regions" (Zuege 99). Niche markets created by social or private enterprise are still only niches. They must find a place within "the contemporary integration and mobility of capital" or go bankrupt. Unions can plan higher-value production, but these efforts are bounded by structural barriers like unemployment and disinvestment (100). Stolarski's plan makes unions responsible for restructuring the labour market and ignores those structural problems, while Shuman reproduces this fallacy on a grander scale. Cooperatives and small enterprise are supposed to accomplish what decades of union struggle could not: making "the wage market... too expensive" and forcing capitalists out. Spare a thought for the poor capitalist who may, under the compulsion of exceeding average profit rates, be forced to undercut small, social enterprise.

In response, Stolarski falls back on the same idealist tautology as Miller, Gibson-

Graham, LETS advocates and Proudhon: "forming the hopeful subject" as a response.

The working class must overcome "barriers... within us, in our own thinking and attitudes." These include misunderstanding the advantages of credit and capital to workers, and "[misunderstanding of all profit-making as being Capitalistic in nature"

(Stolarski). Once we abandon our capitalocentric attitudes, we learn that credit is a neutral tool for workers, rather than a tool for capital circulation. Exploitation is a

"misunderstanding." Profit returns to its neoclassical niche as a return on factors of production. These pro-capitalist politics repeat the political-economic split at the heart of bourgeois economics, in which politics are ephemeral but economic organization is eternal. It is no accident that Miller's vision of the economy is a biological, not a social

264 one. Categories like "creation", "exchange" and "investment" are torn from their historical context and presented free of power or exploitation. Exchange and use are seen as separate, unopposed processes, not the fundamental contradiction of the commodity form on which Marx's entire theory of capital rests on.

The political trajectory of localism

Amin asks, "Why should we expect so much from community in the first place?"

(621). How does a movement dedicated to "anti-racism, feminism, queer liberation, environmental justice... and other movements" (Miller "Our"), set explicitly against the binaries of mainstream economics, end up being neoclassical itself? By recreating the bifurcation of bourgeois political science between politics and economics, localism cedes politics to neoliberalism without any contestation. From an ostensible anti-economism, committed to overturning the oppressive power of political economy analyses, SE turns into a simple form of economism, advocating the power of small firms. This is what allows it to fetishize the local as beyond the reach of capitalist power, even though all strategies to avoid that power encourage "the sacrifices of workers... to intensify work, shift income shares to capital, and appropriate the energies of civil society" (Zuege 98).

Whether those energies are called "the collective knowledge of all members of that industrial union sector" or class collaboration, the result is the same. SE must assume the costs of production and reproduction itself, and allow the benefits of competition to accrue to the much larger capitalist competitors, unburdened as they are by qualms of economic justice. For all its professed radicalism, SE promotes exactly the same kind of micro-market structures that governments at all levels adopt in official neoliberal policy:

265 public-private partnerships, linkages between government, NGO and community groups on the basis of "solidarity" (Jessop 466). Gibson-Graham "position [subjects] as skillful and giving, and endowed with an economic identity within a community economy."

Miller calls for "self-organized relationships of care, cooperation, and community." The rhetoric is nearly identical. Who is co-opting whom?

There is a historical answer. The American left was affected severely by the post­ war decline in working class militancy, "the decline of radical immigrant communities and proletarian subcultures and by the multifaceted social change wrought by an unprecedented period of rapid capital accumulation and rising real incomes" (Camfleld

"Postmodern" 2). A ruling class offensive stamped out the 1960s and early 1970s New

Left's attempt to revitalize itself. Postmodern Marxism, the intellectual milieu that inspires SE, emerged when the remnants of the New Left went into academia in the

1980s (Miller "Other"). The growth of personal wealth combined with social movement decline to form the social base for poststructuralist theory (3). With no broad social struggles to look to for guidance, the Postmodern Marxists turned inwards. To do so they had to strip Marxism of its universalist qualities, rejecting "claims... that capital has determinate laws of motion and that social production plays a distinctively powerful role in shaping the course of the evolution of human societies... [substituting] a decentred notion of society, and the celebration of difference" (4). Theorists tried to grasp local spaces concretely in a way that analyzing social relations appeared not to. However, by ignoring those social relations, they changed the local from a space to analyze and resist to a free space where people could make their own world. For example, Gibson-Graham

266 claim that foreign domestic workers investing in community development is a form of

"refusing to succumb to the slave or victim mentality" (Gibson-Graham "Imagining" 76).

This evades the subordinate position of those workers who must migrate to earn enough to send remittances home. It makes individual women of colour responsible for the effects of their own exploitation, echoing the strictest advocates of neoclassical economics, for whom humanity is a set of individual atoms unrelated at any more than a personal micro-level.

Postcapitalist localism actually replicates the determinist, structuralist accounts of capital it loathes. If capitalism is, as Gibson-Graham suggest, "uneven, fragile, and less extensive than imagined", why do they and SE naturalize the neoliberal destruction of localities? By refusing to fight neoliberalism, their "noncapitalist imaginary" leaves capitalist reality untouched. Technological change is depoliticized, removed from struggle and made into an objective force. The working class, and in particular its most oppressed members, must drag itself out of the predicament capital placed it in: it "is, above all, local communities, women, and workers who must adapt to these impersonal forces. They must be flexible, empower themselves... put democratic pressure on urban administrations to support their informal initiatives, and so on" (Jessop 468). It is a short step from empowerment to bootstrapping. By promoting local solutions to a global system, postcapitalist localism allows that system to continue generating contradictions.

Postcapitalist localism's non-market relations, paradoxically, reinforce market relations for everyone else.

Thus the postcapitalist shift is not a move towards "pleasure and happiness"; in

267 fact, it is a product of deep pessimism:

We started out, embarrassingly, with no real desire for "socialism"....

Over the last hundred years, the word has been drained of Utopian content

and no longer serves, as it once did, to convene and catalyze the left. This

makes it difficult even to speak of "the left" or to use the pronoun "we"

with any confidence or commitment. As self-identified leftists at the end

of the twentieth century, we found ourselves tongue-tied, not knowing

who or what we might speak for (Community Economic Collective 2).

By defeating trade unions, cutting public services and divesting from entire regions, neoliberalism has dampened expectations for community movements to successfully challenge capital's priorities (Gough 418). Ironically enough, as the neoliberal right succeeded, it began to see advantages in the ideology adopted by its apparent foes. Thus it is a mistake to see localism as inherently oppositional. In its most diverse, celebratory and pro-community formulations, official and radical localisms form a continuum of adaptation, harnessing socialization for new regimes of capital accumulation. Localism can be a strategy of neoliberalism, with its postcapitalist variant as an ideological support.

Holloway's critique and capitalist laws of motion

Holloway is important to this discussion because his opposition to structuralism illuminates localist principles to a depth that localists themselves have never explored. A key tension in Marxist theory is identifying which dynamics are permanent in capitalism and which are conjunctural. The tendencies towards concentration and centralization

268 operate beyond the control of any individual or group. However, the notion that capitalism moves according to internal laws could imply overarching structures that

predetermine our behaviour and restrict human agency, a version of Marxism which

some have accused Althusser and Poulantzas of promoting (Barker).

Holloway calls Scientific Marxism the idea that Marx discovered objective laws of society that set the boundaries for subjective class struggle ("Change The World" 121).

It gave authority to those who understood those laws and led to an instrumentalist view of struggle, where history becomes a progression of coming-to-consciousness led by the workers' vanguard party (123).29 Or, as Shaikh summarizes from a critical perspective:

To conceive of capitalism as being subject to 'laws of motion', it is said,

is to treat a human social arrangement as if it were a machine or some

physical process. This downplays and degrades the role of human beings

in determining the course of events. People, not laws of motion, make

history... the analysis of the causes of crises is too abstract an issue to be

of use in the practical politics of class struggle (236).

Holloway suggests that Marxists can take class struggle for granted and turn their

29 Holloway's critique is inaccurate, for two reasons. First, it misunderstands the political purpose of the revolutionary party. Luxemburg accused Lenin of advocating internal party dictatorship, excessive centralization and top-down decision-making. However, for Lenin the organizational function of the party was subordinate to politics. To make a revolution, workers had to have knowledge of all social classes, not just their own. For that, organization was needed to transform "proletarian... into political class consciousness... [uniting] all elementary, spontaneous, dispersed and 'merely' local or sectional protests, revolts and movements of resistance." Centralization - under conditions of Tsarist dictatorship - was a means to an end, not an end in itself (Mandel "Leninist"). Second, portraying Lenin as an elitist ignores his radical democratic transformation under pressure from the Russian workers' movement, expressed both by his break with Kautsky's evolutionary socialism and in State And Revolution's call to remake democracy from below through democratic organs of workers' power (Lenin "State and Revolution" 47). The real history of the socialist workers' movement cannot be collapsed into a teleological line from Marx by way of Lenin to Stalin. This history is full of debate and possibilities that depended on numerous historical factors; it was not given beforehand (Bensai'd 175).

269 entire attention towards political-economic analysis, removing actual people from history

(Holloway "Change The World" 133). It is from this perspective that he argues against

Rosa Luxemburg's reliance on objective capitalist laws: "the emphasis on the importance of subjective action is located against the background of the objective, historic necessity of socialism... there is the same classic dualist separation between the objective and the subjective" (126). If politics is the act of struggling against commodity fetishism, then

Holloway argues that revolution does not have to wait until an indeterminate point in the future. Since there are no objective laws to slow agents down, there is no temporal logic to revolutionary politics. Therefore we do not have to "think of the death of capitalism... in terms of a dagger-blow to the heart, but, rather, in terms of death by... a million rents, gashes, fissures, cracks... [it] is now: a cumulative process, certainly, a process of cracks spreading and joining up... already under way" ("No" 271). The theoretical parallels with localism are clear: rather than an analysis of class formation, deformation and political exigencies, a few small examples can be proposed as successful models, which are then supposed to multiply mechanically until the entire economy is transformed.

The decision to analyze or ignore capitalist laws of motion does not float in a vacuum. As Shaikh argues, choosing not to examine those laws rests on an underlying assumption that the rules and limits of capitalism are external. This, in turn, rests on an even older premise of capitalist ideology: human desires exceed available external resources, resulting in scarcity. If this is true, capitalism is the best way to allow the unfolding of our inner greed, creating an equilibrium between limited supply and limitless demand. The conflict between natural needs and natural resources is, not

270 surprisingly, natural: it "has no limits other than some unimaginable mutation in Human

Nature or some unimaginable destruction in Physical Nature" (220). Scarcity and greed are the tenets of neoclassical economics. And despite the genuine attempts of

Schumacher, Holloway, Carrlson and Gibson-Graham to theorize ways to achieve a harmonious or postcapitalist society, and their widely divergent strategic perspectives, they are united in sharing a set of neoclassical ideological premises that help maintain the myth of capitalist equilibrium.

Class struggle itself is shaped by capital's need to accumulate. As the technical composition of capital rises, less value is created in the production process and profit rates decline. Competition increases for the least expensive inputs, driving more people from the land and proletarianizing them. However, that process increases the working class's capacities to resist (Shaikh 231). Shaikh gives the example of mechanization, which can have contradictory effects. It lowers the amount of variable capital necessary to the production process and can reduce worker militancy by increasing unemployment.

However, by increasing the production of surplus value, it can also provide the basis for higher wages. Higher wages may be the precursor to mechanization today, but they are themselves the result of prior mechanizations (234). Pre-existing material forms of organization sets the terms for the various historical, cultural and ideological factors that drive class struggle.

Anti-Power

Without seeing this relationship, Holloway can write, "History is not the history of the laws of capitalist development but the history of class struggle... we are the only

271 creators, we are the only possible saviours" (178). Crisis is not a product of objective capitalist contradictions but "the expression of our own strength." Revolution is therefore not simply seizing power but the creation of "anti-power" (Holloway "Change The

World" 178). Holloway disavows structuralism, but by claiming all capitalist motion is external, he conducts what Murray calls "empirical structuralism": a sociological account of the balance of class forces unrelated to the capital-labour and capital-land relations

("Part One" 120). Holloway fails to identify the limits that fetishized commodities-in- motion place on working class capacities ("Change The World" 215). Collective resistance is always-already present and arises from the tabula rasa of our individual consciousness.

The problem with this kind of voluntarism is not simply its abandonment of empirical reality; it also fails on its own terms. If we spend our time theorizing and practicing against objective laws of motion - be they "fetishistic" or "capitalocentric" - we are left with an overwhelming project of social change. If revolution is no longer in the future, it is right now and the "argument for revolution now starts from a much sharper sense of urgency. The existence of capital is an aggression... that... threatens to annihilate humanity completely... [its] violence seems to be taking us... towards imminent catastrophe" ("No" 275). The catastrophism that is Holloway's gesture to empirically- verifiable reality does not just free us from our domination by laws of motion: it makes us personally responsible for world-historical tasks. The degeneration of left forces has had a crushing effect on leftist optimism and aspirations, while the decline of Marxism has left activists without substantial tools for developing a strategic understanding of

272 capitalism. Significantly, this voluntarism parallels with localism's new subjectivities embodied in the new petit bourgeoisie, the declasse professional, the DIY drop-out and others (Carrlson 51; Estill 97).

Murray agrees that class struggle cannot be assumed. However, he warns against abandoning it to our personal desires: "[w]ith so small an area submitted to the pessimism of the intellect, too large a zone is left to the optimism of the will" ("Part One" 117). That can shift quickly to pessimism of the will, an existential resignation in the face of the enormity of the task of social change, overpowering any advantages from "fragility."

Given localism's reliance on external catastrophe as its own law of motion, this appears to be exactly what has happened.

The point of this argument is not to draw a reductive link between economic changes and resistance. It is to show the analytical primacy of social production and reproduction, instead of leaving the material and the ideological as idealist agents acting independently on history. For Marx, there is no contradiction between the objective laws and subjective class struggle. Rather, the existence of these laws is a sign of the fetishization of human labour, embodied in abstractions like money that eclipse the real human relations creating them. Without these abstractions, there would be no capitalism

- an insight theorized by Holloway, but also by Rubin 80 years previously without the accompanying ambiguities about agency. This leaves class struggle as the only historical force capable of overturning capitalist rule, but it does not leave it out of context. The dialectical Marxist tradition can theorize the relation between subjective force and objective laws without collapsing the two or simply emphasizing one side.

273 Capitalism as contradictory

Like localism, many pre-Marxian socialisms idealize a pre-capitalist era and use this as the basis for a moral judgement against capitalism (Marx and Engels 70, 73). In doing so, they miss how capitalism combines vast improvements in technical capacity and social organization with exploitation and environmental degradation. Lenin, the strident anti-capitalist revolutionary, did not condemn capitalism outright: "there is nothing more absurd than to conclude from the contradictions of capitalism that the latter is impossible, non-progressive, and so on - to do that is to take refuge from unpleasant, but undoubted realities in the transcendental heights of romantic dreams" ("Development of Capitalism" 58). Debating the Narodniks, Russian revolutionaries who promoted the village commune structure as the natural successor to capitalism, Lenin argues that

"[recognition of the progressiveness of [capitalism's] role is quite compatible... with the full recognition of the negative and dark sides of capitalism... [its] profound and all-round social contradictions... which reveal the historically transient character of this economic regime." Those who "exert every effort to show that an admission of the historically progressive nature of capitalism means an apology for capitalism... are at most fault in underrating (and sometimes in even ignoring) the most profound contradictions" (595).

The importance of those contradictions lies in how they allow Marxists to theorize capitalist fragility. As Luxemburg argues, "besides the obstacles, capitalism also furnishes the only possibilities of realizing the socialist program" ("Reform" 119). This theoretical absence is due to the dual nature of the term progressive. It is often given a moral gloss, sometimes by Marxists themselves, as when capitalism is seen as doing the

274 necessary dirty work to civilize backward nations (Harvey "Spaces" 72). However, this does not reflect the entire sense in which Marx meant the term, as his own thought evolved on the matter.

In his 1853 writings on India, Marx claimed that its society had no history, and thus English colonization would eliminate the system of hereditary village self- government that blocked social development (Ahmad 226). This flows from Marx's conception of political economy, in which any shift to a new mode of production would entail violence and the partial destruction of what came before it (230). Commodity production would destroy small-scale handicraft industry and markets, centralizing both.

However, Marx would come to give more theoretical weight to capital's contradictions, becoming acutely conscious of the great crimes capitalism committed upon non-capitalist people. The Eurocentrism in Marx's writings, based on inaccurate accounts of Asian society, developed alongside a growing celebration of anti-colonial resistance (229). While Marx was claiming British colonialism was a necessary evil to develop Indian society, he also claimed that its potential would remain unrealized until there was an anti-imperialist revolution in India or socialist revolution occurred in Britain

(Anderson 86). Marx moved away from a unilinear perspective that saw a strict, stageist development from feudalism to socialism, to a multilinear one that allowed different historical possibilities. Industrialization was not the only form of development, particularly at the periphery of the growing capitalist market where different forms of communal property held sway (90, 88). For example, in 1848 he dismissed the Russian peasantry as unable to break the hold of Tsarism, whereas in 1858 he accepted the

275 possibility of agrarian revolt and the communal village structure as creating the basis for socialism (86). He took copious notes on non-European and non-capitalist history, deepening his analysis of those societies' gender and class relations and communal property forms (93). By the end of his life, Marx was aware that capitalism would develop different societies unevenly, creating multiple possible developments.

This meant abandoning any faith in the development of the forces of production alone to overturn the system. As Trotsky writes, "If the existence of the capitalist system were not limited by class relations and the revolutionary struggle that arises from them, we should have some grounds for supposing that technique, approaching the ideal of a single automatic mechanism within the framework of the capitalist system, would thereby automatically abolish capitalism" ("Results" Chapter Seven). The role of technology is strictly limited by the crisis tendencies embedded in capitalism, as well as the consciousness of the workers who use it. Technological rationality is a form of reification: "theorists of the omnipotence of technology elevate it into a mechanism completely independent of all human objectives and decisions, which proceeds independently of class structure and class rule in the automatic manner of a natural law"

(Mandel "Late Capitalism" 503).

Localism accepts this "automatic manner" in reverse. It shares a common premise with the capitalist class: both believe in the ability "of capital to 'integrate' the worker as producer at his place of work and to provide him with creative rather than alienated labour as a means of'self-realization'" (506). However, technological progress, including the growth of economies of scale, cannot be understood apart from the contradiction

276 between use and exchange value, which it recreates at a larger level. Capitalism is no longer a technical prerequisite for socialism.

Combined and uneven development

By opposing large-scale development in principle, localism freezes capitalist history, making it relevant across different spaces and times and repeating the unilinearity of Marx's early journalism. However, the growth of a world market and labour force creates contradictory tendencies and contains within it the possibilities of emancipation.

Lenin's recognition of capitalist development was made from the perspective of a nation on the margins of capitalism. As Trotsky later theorized, that marginal status was precisely what allowed Russia to break with world capitalism, a contradiction that led to his famous thesis on combined and uneven development.

Capital centralizes in the developed world due to the initial concentration of advanced technology there, and the limits of socio-political forces in underdeveloped world to control capital flows (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 319). However, when states develop new technologies, other states eventually get hold of them and eliminate their competitive advantage (Davidson 23). Those behind the competitive curve can bypass stages of technological development. However, this leads to a patchwork of development, creating pockets of wealth amid large-scale poverty, and the resulting social tensions raise the prospects for revolutionary change, particularly in the Global South.

There are two important consequences. First, capitalism does not move inexorably forward, progressing through stages of history; therefore there is no need for socialist movements to wait for full-fledged capitalist development before struggling for

277 socialism. The uneven nature of development means that internal contradictions lead to economic crisis and war long before a state that has recently developed a fully capitalist economy can achieve the level of wealth of a mature one ("Permanent" Chapter 10). The recent upheavals in the Middle East, where the elites control vast, international business interests while ordinary people face price increases for basic goods, suggests that combined and uneven development is alive and well.

Second, a progressive historical role for capitalism ended in the trenches of The first World War, as the collective slaughter made it clear that capitalists would send entire generations to their deaths rather than sharing wealth equitably. The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have confirmed that capitalism will off-load crises onto millions of poor people, directly through resource wars or indirectly through famine and other so-called natural disasters. Earlier Marxists may have underestimated capitalism's survival instinct, but they saw that capitalism is completely amoral, and will expand regardless of the consequences unless it is replaced.

How a future socialist society could work

If capitalism creates the potential agent of its replacement and the means for it to do so, this poses some difficult questions about how a socialist society could end the crises and contradictions of capitalism. Some left-localisms acknowledge the limits of a subjective, voluntarist approach to this transformative process and create specific plans drawn from historical examples. Unlike McKibben, who dismisses all socialism as

Stalinism (104), Hahnel and Albert use Participatory Economics (Parecon) to theorize the transition to socialism, supporting democratic councils of workers and consumers from

278 the experiences of revolutionary uprisings across Russia, Britain, Germany and elsewhere. These councils provide the locus for determining production and consumption decisions democratically from below. They are organized into progressively larger federations that propose and make counter-proposals for production coordination (193).

Hahnel and Albert acknowledge it is a model of postcapitalist production and distribution, not a way to overcome the rule of capital. It is also free from the fetishization of small that hinders the localists.

Libertarian Municipalism (LM) outlines a postcapitalist vision similar to Parecon, in which citizen assemblies meet to plan community priorities within a transparent democratic process (Biehl and Bookchin 61). Drawing on Bakunin and Kropotkin, this form of "communalism holds out the ideal of decentralized, Stateless, and collectively managed 'communes,' or communities" (81). LM understands better than other postcapitalist politics that no single municipality can address the complexities of a social economy, and thus the scale of social organization must address existing capitalist realities. "Small is not necessarily beautiful at all, and municipal autonomy in itself does not guarantee that municipalities will be enlightened or free... the municipality is relatively powerless to challenge broad social forces - fighting in isolation, it would scarcely pose any threat at all" (95). Therefore LM "is not strictly a localist philosophy", calling for "some kind of transmunicipal form of organization" to create democracy", since a "thoroughgoing localism and decentralism, has consequences at least as unsavoury as those raised by Statists" (96).

LM blames the state for "eviscerating community life in favour of bureaucracy"

279 while capital puts such intense pressure on citizens that it eliminates the capacity to exercise democratic freedoms (48). To reverse this process LM reinvigorates local politics, "empowering people so that they are capable of ridding our societies of these destructive social processes" (49). LM differs from Marxism, which sees local states as micro-regulators of accumulation, not autonomous entities open to popular control

(Cockburn 46). However, contrary to the Utopian localist vision that power will simply fade away, LM theorists believe "a confederation of democratized municipalities" will be under threat from the existing capitalist state and must overcome the latter's powers of coercion (Biehl and Bookchin 123).

Postcapitalist theory develops strong arguments for democratic planning that takes into account local, national and international production priorities. Campbell suggests that a combination of centralized and decentralized production can be determined, based on how much local information is necessary for it (34). Complex information technology allows interplay between decisions at different spatial levels, as well as creating a reward system for decisions that create social and ecological equity

(Kotz 132). Laibman distinguishes between local production and non-local decision­ making in a socialist society, proposing organizations to democratically control production that begin within local enterprises and exist throughout local, regional and national coordinating bodies (117).

Thus there is no necessary conflict between anarchist- and Marxist-inspired socialism. Albo agrees with Hahnel that democratic control over planning is part of any postcapitalist economy, advocating "self-managed community services (either newly

280 formed or partly devolved from traditional state administration) such as cultural production, environmental clean-up, education and leisure." Control by organs of workers' power could "determine socially-useful activities, community needs, and local skills" ("Obstacles" 38). Once the focus on exchange-value is eliminated and democratic control over use-values is established, production for production's sake disappears.

Parecon's detailed plans for democratic productive and distributive mechanisms are useful, because they show how democratic decision-making can allow social need, rather than accumulation, to guide production, opening the prospect of smaller-scale, democratically-managed facilities (29).

Against postcapitalist prefiguration

There is nothing inherent in either anarchism or socialism that leads to utopianism; the danger lies in model-building that abstracts from present conditions.

Those alternatives can run the gamut from communes to cooperatives: the question is not only their technical limitations or possibilities, but whether they accept or challenge capitalist power. Hahnel criticizes those who plan for a transition to a post-capitalist economy without working out what it would look like, calling their speculations a product of "vision" rather than coherent modelling ("Economic" 182). Unfortunately,

Hahnel and Albert's own plans ignore the transition itself. They suggest the Parecon nation could offer more positive terms of trade to poorer countries, allowing it to maintain its alternative economy and encouraging similar developments elsewhere (212).

Little by little, postcapitalism could test schemes for social organization and prove the viability of new forms of cooperation in practice (254). However, if Parecon or LM was

281 to successfully transcend the local, ruling classes would go to war to prevent the loss of their power, as they have done many times in the twentieth century (Lamb "The

History"). Politically, as both enabler and enforcer of capitalist social relations, the capitalist state presents a huge barrier to those seeking to move outside the market. Albert and Hahnel are aware of imperialism and advocate building social movements to fight

U.S. militarism (259). However, given that the discussion of imperialism occupies three and a half pages out of over 400 in Parecon, it is clear that building "pockets of equitable cooperation" is the main priority.

Localism evades the question of political power by equating sustainable living with activism. Hahnel argues "that creating minialternatives to capitalism before capitalism can be replaced entirely is an important part of a successful strategy to eventually replace capitalism altogether." Carrlson concurs, viewing postcapitalist society as an experimental process characterized by the linking up of local communities across the planet (211). Hahnel's caveat that "this does not mean it is always better to seek a solution to a problem outside the capitalist economy than it is to address the problem through a reform campaign" does not correct the error ("Economic" 343). The problem is that, by Hahnel's own admission, these schemes face limits from the market and fail on their own terms - or, when they succeed, they are not local or economic, instead relying on socialist political organizing. The only terms on which they do succeed are by demonstrating a different way of living: the classic anarchist propaganda of the deed.

Gramsci cautioned that creating blueprints for future societies and movements is an abstract exercise in building

282 movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last

detail or in line with abstract theory (which comes to the same thing). But

reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations. It is up to the

theoretician to unravel these in order... to 'translate' into theoretical

language the elements of historical life. It is not reality which should be

expected to conform to the abstract schema (200).

Posing a particular version of a future society, and then condemning those who do not share it, ignores the "bizarre combinations" that form the reality of class struggle. The point is to discern what particular political arguments can be mobilized in order to weaken the capitalist ideological agenda as a whole. As Orwell cautioned, progressive politics do not arrive fully-formed in one's head: "no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism... His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out" (155). The reproduction of capitalist social relations will continue to create new abuses, but it is these contradictions, and not ideal postcapitalist visions, that provide the raw material for organizing.

The prospect of capitalist reaction should not prevent any radical from pursuing a struggle for reforms and building the capacity of working class movements to govern society. As Hahnel suggests, "the more powerful the progressive economic movement, the larger and more democratic the organizations representing workers and consumers, and the more sympathetic government is to our cause" ("Economic" 268). He acknowledges that reforms will be partial as long as economic power rests on the market, and that even Keynesian redistribution will not be enough to create institutions amenable

283 to economic justice. The ANC in South Africa and the Workers Party in Brazil made their peace with capital and ended up reneging on their election promises, and Hahnel suggests that social movements must run the economy themselves if capital flees a state

(270). However, he insists that "only prefigurative experiments in equitable cooperation... can begin to accomplish that" (271).

For example, Carrlson praises DIY bike shop activists for being "resourceful, politically engaged, and passionate. They challenge the transit and energy systems shaped by capitalism but crucially, they are making connections in practice between race, class, gender, and urban life, city planning, technology and ecological reinhabitation" (126).

These are prefigurative, "shap[ing] the world consciously instead of reproducing it as it is" (47). The activists' moral fortitude is beyond question, but capital and its political representatives may not be moved to build greener transportation systems and urban planning when people build their own bikes. Teaching poor people to build bikes is a laudable survival strategy, but it may not build a movement to challenge race, class or gender relations. These spaces can provide alternative learning, create new relationships and bring new people into struggle. They can also be incredibly exclusive spaces, turning away those who do not look or dress the right way. But more importantly, building mini- alternatives takes up tremendous amounts of time and energy. No matter how much activists building alternative spaces may hate capitalism, the intentional communities,

LETS systems and CSAs direct the attention of activists away from reform campaigns and towards building their own ostensibly liberated spaces.

While movements can fight for a more equitable distribution of resources under

284 capitalism, it is not simply a matter of putting "equitable cooperation", "the local", or

"community" in place of "socialism" as a goal and assuming the result will be the same.

This evades the most important strategic question: how the existing powers that maintain irrational exchange-values can be overcome. For example, it is absolutely true that

"critics of capitalism have got to think through and explain to others how we propose to do things differently, and why outcomes will be significantly better" (Hahnel

"Economic" 376). But this cannot happen outside of the realm of struggle; otherwise there is the risk reproducing the contradictions of capitalism within small, alternative spaces. It is difficult to see how building alternative transport networks, without organizing against the political decisions behind urban planning, is actually a "challenge

[to] the transit and energy systems shaped by capitalism." As the rent-based battles over community gardens show, it is a fallacy to believe first that capitalists will ignore efforts to create micro-alternatives if it threatens accumulation, and second that building those alternatives provides a basis for successful counter-organizing.

Kotz calls it "overreaching" to plan too much of the future socialist society, for the practical reason that it "is simply too complex, and dependent on too many contingent and currently unknowable factors" (134). The task of those who wish to move towards socialism is political, "to search for viable sets of strategic orientations and principles around which struggles in specific times and places might advance" (Albo "Obstacles"

40). By mobilizing the creative energies of participants in production and distribution schemes, localism encompasses values and goals amenable to social justice, such as

"nonmarket relations, cooperation in production, skill and innovation, community,

285 pluralism" (Gough 424). However, if capital is the cause, then the solution must be equally fundamental, "enhancing], with material supports, the capacities of democratic movements... at every level, from local organizations to communities up to the nation- state and beyond, to challenge the power of capital" (Albo "Obstacles" 28). This perspective changes a perception of the local as outside, beyond or an alternative to capitalism, to a site of struggle against capital.

For example, Hahnel references the fruitful 1970s debate on how to build and maintain revolutionary spheres of influence. This remains an interesting historical debate on how to achieve lasting power during a transition to socialism (Bensai'd 84). Based on the experience of the Zapatistas and other liberation struggles, Hahnel argues "the lesson for those of us living in 'the center' is that living experiments in equitable cooperation... begin the process of establishing new norms and expectations among broad segments of the population beyond the core of anticapitalist activists" ("Economic" 341). His suggestions include adopting LETS systems, worker ownership, consumer cooperatives and CSA, but in each case he stresses the limits of experimentation, given these spaces' embeddedness in the global economy (363). Meanwhile he promotes state-wide experiments in democratic economies, in Kerala, India and in Brazil, which have achieved some important reforms despite the exigencies of neoliberalism.

In order to equate political struggles in the Global South with micro-alternatives in the Global North, Hahnel must ignore some important differences. In Kerala, the only way local space for reforms could be made was by electing a provincial government largely composed of the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M). Even this level of

286 political mobilization has not proven an effective bulwark against neoliberalism: in West

Bengal, the CPI-M attempted to expropriate peasant lands for an auto plant, leading to mass armed revolt (Chandran and Dhar). By equating mass parties gaining control of the state machinery with experiments in alternative living, Hahnel blurs the means by which activists fight for socialism. There are valid criticisms of Communists entering capitalist governments and parties and abandoning their revolutionary work (Post "Obama"); however, even this kind of reformism poses a much greater threat to capital than the federation of intentional communities that Hahnel advocates ("Economic" 368). He comes close to advocating socialist politics when calling for the revitalization of the labour movement (302). However, since the small leftist group that industrial activists have joined have turned into sects, the alternative is to join "equitable living communities", where even union officials will find like-minded thinkers and be less tempted to betray the interests of the workers (304). This is another form of lifestylism, with all its inherent dangers of separation from the bulk of society that radicals want to change, something Hahnel himself acknowledges (372).

For collective preflguration

If localist community schemes create a sense of social responsibility, so do organizing social movements that challenge capitalist power. Unlike left-localism, the former do not have to rely on a strict set of cultural, ethical and productive activities.

When it is not reduced to model-building, preflguration posed by social movements provides an important theoretical grounding for anti-capitalist politics. Laibman's scales of democractic production were presaged in the U.S. by Daniel DeLeon's Industrial

287 Unionism, an early twentieth century system of democratic economic management from- below (Hass). More broadly, Marx's experience of historical struggle taught him that new forms of democratic organization would emerge from existing social movements. He studied the Paris Commune closely and determined that the neighbourhood and workplace councils that sprang up to replace the deposed central government were a progressive example of self-government ("Civil War" 73). Lenin recognized this as a fundamental lesson forgotten by the Second International and applied it to the Russian

Revolution, seeing in the workers' soviets the same form of direct democracy ("State and

Revolution" 44, 89). He formulated this as a problem of dual power, in which a challenge to state power by "the direct initiative of the people from below" creates competing centres of power that must expand or die. The mobilized working class creates organs of self-government to run society, replacing state officials, police and the military with democratic representatives ("Dual Power" 28)

Prefiguration from struggle continues to this day. In 2006, the state governor of

Oaxaca, Mexico sent 1000 police to break up a sit-in demanding minimum wage for teachers. The teachers and residents fought back, driving the police and government officials out of the city and setting up the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, which they declared as the new governing power in the state. It set priorities for the thousands of protestors and residents who occupied the city and eventually created a new state constitution, before being driven out by paramilitaries under control of the governor

(Stout; Davies). Nearly 100 years after Lenin warned of "dual power", where new forms of self-government conflict with the existing state, the people of Oaxaca learned that their

288 own, democratic institutions must expand or be pushed back.

Marx describes the defeated nineteenth century proletariat

throwing] itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and

workers' associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the

revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter's own great,

combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind

society's back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of

existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck ("Eighteenth

Brumaire" 405).

Postcapitalist schemes for micro-alternatives and attempts to evade the law of value are all examples of ignoring capitalism's "great, combined resources" and proceeding "behind society's back, in private fashion." But class struggle allows activists to learn directly about the strategies and principles necessary to build a movement. This kind of prefiguration embodies social justice, cooperation and community, all cherished localist values, plus the most important of all, collective resistance. Rather than imagining possible futures, we can practice and learn about the political steps needed to get there.

Parecon, postcapitalism and SE differ on the details, but they all either reject collective struggle or define it as an alternative way of life. Marx criticized Proudhon for choosing good and bad economic and historical phenomena, as if it was possible to remain above class struggle and pick sides at will, harmonizing labor and capital while maintaining exploitation. As Luxemburg argues, "it is logical that (reformist socialism)

289 should also 'try to thwart' capitalism in general, for it is unquestionably the chief criminal placing all these obstacles in the way of socialism" ("Reform" 119). If localism truly wants to stop the alienation and ecological damage it observes, it needs to attack the root: capitalism.

Uneven and combined development means that local anti-capitalist resistance can have a global impact. Indigenous struggles to control land and water and protect subsistence livelihoods block the development of the forces of production, which a rigid, determinist Marxism would oppose, since capitalism socializes the proletariat. However, movements to resist capital's incursion can improve the lives of those resisting and providing a model for bigger revolts. For example, struggles like Zapatismo practice an

"inclusionary politics... in a more open and fluid search for alternatives", drawing

"strengths from embeddedness in the nitty-gritty of daily life and struggle" (Harvey

"Spaces" 63). The Bolivian water wars of 2005 led to national revolts that eventually overthrew the president; the Tunisian uprising of 2011 was sparked by a street vendor whose cart was confiscated by police. Subsistence movements can show broader society that resistance is possible; linked up with trade union and socialist movements, they can create new development strategies that do not rely on growth for growth's sake. History, politics and culture are sufficiently complex that it is impossible to predict where struggle will break out: radicals have to be flexible enough to see the anti-capitalist potential in all forms of resistance, and theoretically grounded enough to see that resistance on its own, while vital, needs to be connected to a political vision of how to overcome capitalist power and reorganize society. Capitalism will not end by becoming top-heavy: somebody

290 has to end it, and social movements winning reforms build people's confidence to resist.

The role of the proletariat

The Marxist agent of change is the working class, not because it contains more socially progressive or more able people than other classes, but because it is the source of the commodity labour-power without which the accumulation of capital halts. The existence of the working class has been disputed many times, and localism is not the first tradition to search for an alternative agent of change. Before ethical entrepreneurs and gardeners there were other vanguards: students, an undefined mass called the Third

World, small guerrilla movements and others (Bensai'd 81, 85). However, the empirical existence for a group of people who do not own the means of production and must sell their labour power to survive has never been stronger. The proletariat consists of between two to three billion people, and between two-thirds to four-fifths of the Global North

(119; Eagleton "Marx" 176).

Since workers must sell the one commodity they possess, their labour power, they are denied humanity and exist as machine-parts. However, workers are not machines: they retain the capacity to become conscious of their complete alienation. The worker's

"knowledge is the commodity's self-knowledge; his consciousness is the commodity's consciousness of itself' (Jakubowski 114). Their self-knowledge embodies a dual, contradictory consciousness, enabling the destruction of the former and the self- realisation of the proletariat, through revolutionary politics (Lukacs 87).30 Unlike petty

30 It is strange that Holloway's concept of fetishism does not lead him to a similar dualism. Commodity fetishism, the embodiment of capitalist social relations in objects, rules all interactions in capitalist society, and this leads to separation from humanity's essential powers and the "self-negation of doing" ("Change

291 bourgeois consciousness, workers have the potential to understand the dynamics of the capitalist system as a whole. If working class consciousness is politically developed, it can "'totalize' the social order", for its unique position at the centre of exploitation provides knowledge of the social whole (Eagleton "Ideology" 95).

Assuming the working class either has no agency, or denying the strategic questions of how that agency is achieved, actually contributes to that lack of agency:

"[w]hen thinkers sincerely and profoundly hostile to capitalism proclaim the impotence of the proletariat in the imperialist countries to challenge the existing social order," they perpetuate the ruling class ideology of powerlessness (Mandel "Late Capitalism" 506).

Anti-capitalist sentiment is not enough: the agents of change must be identified, and that identification poses political questions.

Learning from the history of Marxism

Bensai'd's Theses of Resistance provides a number of principles for guiding the politics of socialist renewal. The global degeneration of the left has seen the near- disappearance of social democracy and Stalinism as political forces. Although these have been the traditional enemies of an open Marxism, their decline has disoriented that tradition (106). Bensai'd defines this as a transitional moment and suggests three premises that can be rescued from the rich historical legacy of Marxian thought.

The World" 43). Holloway dedicates himself to that fetishism's destruction. But if it is true that fetishism is not a homogenous state but "the antagonistic movement of fetishisation against anti-fetishisation" (104), then surely the objective contradictions of capitalist society demonstrate their own existence. Naming them can therefore be part of the struggle of "anti-fetishisation", quite apart from any strategic advantages understanding the law of value may provide. This alienation is, in fact, potentially revolutionary: workers are objectified, but that objectification makes it possible for them to attain an understanding of that process. Holloway's outright condemnation of commodification is an example of precisely the kind of one-sided, pre-Marxian socialism that Lenin criticized: commodification is in fact the only means by which "the worker can... become conscious of his social being by becoming conscious of himself as a commodity" (Jakubowski 114).

292 First, localism is one of the political trends that reflects the philosophical degeneration of poststructuralism. The commodification of politics, combined with the political narrowing of neoliberalism, has led to the victory of abstract space over time, in which time is reduced to an ephemeral present. The impact is that "the admiration for the local, the search for origins, the ornamental overload and the manoeuvres of authenticity undoubtedly reveal a distressed vertigo verifying the impotence of politics faced with conditions that have become uncertain" (126). This neatly describes Gibson-Graham's trajectory from socialism to search for authentic local spaces. Instead, it is necessary to re-emphasize local spaces as the site of class struggle, examining how they "produce spatial differences irreducible to the single economic logic" of capital (127).

Second, Marxism identifies class struggle as a central dynamic of capitalist society. Brenner suggests that class can be understood as both location and relation. Class location is part of a complex, interlayered set of identities composed of, but not reducible to any particular strand of class, race, gender and sexuality. It allows a deeper exploration of "how social structures constrain the range of understandings and ways of positioning oneself available for any individual in the group to take up" and the political implications of those divisions (304). Class relation places those identities within the process of capitalist exploitation that determines the political context of both accumulation and resistance (294). This avoids leaving social class as a static sociological category, naturalizing difference and, in the process, eliminating the concrete struggle for universal emancipation - a freedom that embraces, rather than erases difference (Bensai'd 124).

Class is a structuring relation, describing the relationship between those who own, and

293 those who are separated from, the means of production at the level of production, distribution and reproduction (118). Localism, which assumes the lack of working class collectivity and agency from the outset, does not further that investigation.

Third, the necessity of socialist revolution must be rescued from those ex-

Stalinists who now feel all revolutionary upheaval results in tyranny, and from liberals, who were never convinced otherwise. This historical legacy must be examined concretely rather than dismissed, as successful revolutions were implemented in societies undergoing primitive accumulation like Russia and China, with the attendant dangers of elite stratification and the creation of bureaucratic ruling classes (115). These are not arguments against revolution, but for a real engagement with the political questions the examples pose: how to attain and spread power against capital. This means rejecting both spontaneous, leaderless struggles that appear and disappear without historical coherency, strict vanguardism that interferes with broad political learning from the rhythm of class struggle itself and, most importantly for this thesis, an ethical vanguard that abstracts both goals and methods from real history. Lessons from the latter can be discerned, studied and applied (130).

Rosa Luxemburg and social revolution

By posing the question "Reform or Social Revolution?" Rosa Luxemburg helped clarify these lessons. She was a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which prior to The first World War was a mass workers' party with millions of members, parliamentary representatives, newspapers and schools. The SPD was formally committed to socialism, but Luxemburg felt its bureaucrats and leaders had grown too

294 comfortable; they were happier representing the German working class than ending its exploitation.

Her polemic against Eduard Bernstein, the leader of the right wing in the SPD, was rooted in Marx's view of capitalism as inherently unstable. Bernstein felt capitalism could adapt to new circumstances and offset crises, using credit and technology to overcome its national boundaries and expand outwards forever ("Reform" 62). According to Bernstein the relative prosperity of the middle classes and the achievements of union struggle were signs of the incorporation of workers into a stable political system.

Therefore socialists must not struggle for political power but instead work to improve working class living standards. The SPD "must not expect to institute socialism as a result of a political and social crisis but by means of the progressive extension of social control and the gradual application of the principle of cooperation" (56). Idealist politics were the result, as Bernstein argued, "Why represent socialism as the consequence of economic compulsion?... Why degrade man's understanding, his feeling for justice, his will?" Luxemburg commented drily, "We thus quite happily return to the principle of justice, to the old warhorse on which the reformers of the earth have rocked for ages, for lack of surer means of historical transportation" (107).

By viewing capitalism as fundamentally stable, Bernstein could advocate slow, evolutionary change. However, the traditional reforms of social democracy, such as the creation of state enterprises and social welfare provisions can, at best, buffer the drive to achieve SNALT. Trade unions can negotiate better conditions for the sale of labour power, but they cannot determine demand (what production is necessary) or supply (the

295 numbers of workers available) (75). Social, legislative reforms also suffer similar limits.

Given the ubiquity of private property, and the simplification of capitalist ownership from individual proprietorship to impersonal share-holding, social reforms are "not a threat to capitalist exploitation but simply the normalization of this exploitation."

Reforms become a way to maintain the smooth operation of accumulation, ameliorating the worst aspects of exploitation and creating a safety valve (79).

These contradictions doomed the SPD and present-day reformists to failure, with dire political consequences: "since social reforms in the capitalist world are... an empty promise no matter what tactic one uses, the next logical step is necessarily disillusionment in social reform" (88). People stopped trying to change society and left it to their parties to do it for them. Small, evolutionary changes became the only possible alternative. In turn, parties like the SPD began to see revolutionary change as an obstacle to their own stability.

If social democracy could not solve the contradictions of capital's drive to accumulate, Luxemburg's assessment of its crisis tendencies led to the necessity of overthrowing it. She argued that cartels (monopolies) must sell abroad what national markets cannot absorb, at a much lower rate. This increases competition abroad, reproducing the anarchy of capitalist firms internationally and leading inexorably to crisis

(64). From "the standpoint of scientific socialism, the historical necessity of the socialist revolution manifests itself above all in the growing anarchy of capitalism which drives the system into an impasse" (58).

Even with its gradual reformism, the SPD still had a program for large-scale

296 social change, something the localists have abandoned entirely. But Bernstein's optimism and localism's pessimism are two sides of the same argument. Either "the 'means of adaptation' are really capable of stopping the breakdown of the capitalist system," as

Luxemburg wrote, or they are capable of stopping social movements from changing it.

Either way, "capitalism (can) maintain itself by suppressing its own contradictions." In the best-case scenario, left-wing officials suppress those contradictions; in the worst- case, they get offloaded onto workers and the environment. The common assumption between Bernstein and Gibson-Graham is that capitalism is eternal. We can embrace, tinker with or ignore it, but we cannot end it. For theories based on building hope, this is a bleak prospect.

Today, neoliberalism has constricted democratic rights. The "more universal the market becomes as an economic regulator, the more democracy is confined to certain purely 'formal' rights, at best the right to elect the political ruling class." As capital concentrates and centralizes globally, "the less possible it is for socialists just to tinker with economic policies to improve equity or firm-level competitiveness" (Albo

"Obstacles" 27). But if neoliberalism weakens the prospects for reform, it also helps demonstrate the Marxist argument that capitalism cannot create a humane world. The question then becomes: how do we spread that understanding, and how can people act on it?

Luxemburg opposed reforms that blunt the class struggle not only because "they lose not only their supposed effectiveness, but also cease to be a means of preparing the working class for the proletarian conquest of power." In other words, for Marxism the

297 "struggle for reform is its means; the social revolution, its goaF ("Reform" 52). All activists fight for reforms; the "difference is not in the what but in the how." Reforms can either be a means of simply making immediate improvements in living conditions, or they can also encourage the political capacities of the working class for collective self- organization (85). As Luxemburg suggests, the "great socialist significance of the trade- union and parliamentary struggles is that through them the awareness, the consciousness, of the proletariat becomes socialist, and it is organized as a class." Large, class-conscious workers' movements are only the beginning: they face "a long and stubborn struggle" with many defeats along the way (122). Local movements are key to this struggle when they challenge capitalist social relations, fighting for control over work processes, resources and against environmental degradation (Harvey "Spaces" 114). Understanding the linkages between accumulation and local development or, put differently, the impact of exchange-value on production, also broadens the possible actions to enhance local democratic control.

For example, to create democratic local food policy, food sovereignty activists have focused on food production and distribution: however, once food is conceived as one link in the capital circuit, democratic controls over finance and trade, new work regulations to encourage full employment and other social welfare measures become part of the overall movement to challenge exchange-value (Albo "Obstacles" 39). They are all aspects of managing the ecological crisis, even though they may not appear directly related.

Likewise, many localists oppose large retail stores opening in their

298 neighbourhoods that force small businesses into bankruptcy, pay low wages and violate environmental regulations. By understanding how capital extracts more surplus value from workers, activists can broaden the range of possible responses. By raising Absolute

Surplus Value (ASV), firms either lower workers' wages or increase their time spent working. By raising Relative Surplus Value (RSV), firms implement new technologies that make individual workers more productive. Both strategies lower the value embedded in commodities. However, stopping one retail outlet from opening does not change this dynamic. It can even have unintended consequences: imposing limits to ASV can force capital to introduce new technologies and forms of organization to make savings at other points in the supply chain, either increasing ASV in countries with fewer labour rights, or increasing RSV and contributing to unemployment and job stress. Organizing the workers into unions, at the retail giants and their suppliers, restricts both RSV and ASV.

These are just two ways an understanding of capitalist political economy can shape resistance. The following three examples show more concretely how activists have applied this understanding. The first demonstrates the problems of attempting to create democratic resistance while accepting the limits of neoliberal budgets; the latter two show how a direct challenge to neoliberalism can make more profound changes in people's living conditions and political consciousness.

Participatory Budgeting in Toronto

The process of Participatory Budgeting (PB) allows the people whose lives are affected by a particular budget to help design and implement it. This is the best-case application of localist principles, because it is potentially a radically democratic practice,

299 in line with the original meaning of democracy, the rule of the poor (McNally "Another

World" 190). However, its limitations show how a false separation between the state and the private sector can hinder reforms. PB is most widely known for its implementation in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, after the Workers Party (PT) won city council elections in 1989. Once tax reform increased funds available to the municipal government, the local administration convened popular assemblies to determine budget priorities. Previously, those priorities consisted almost entirely of wages and patronage deals. In contrast, the PB channelled funds into social measures like affordable housing, roadworks, water treatment and education. Equally importantly, these demands were crafted by the local population, not handed down by experts. With concrete improvements came increased participation: from under 1000 citizens involved in 1990, over 20,000 were a part of the process by 2001 (Bruce 65). The PB was adopted by numerous other municipal administrations, as well as the state of Rio Grande do Sul from

1999 to 2002.

PB has been implemented in the Global North as well. Tenants in public housing at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) have used PB since 2001. The

TCHC houses 164,000 tenants and is the second-biggest social housing corporation in

North America. It opens $1.8 million dollars per year, or 13 percent of the TCHC's annual $9 million capital projects budget, to democratic allocation according to a three- year process of tenant consultation and voting (Lyons). Tenants are allowed to make small changes such as purchasing new hallway tiles, kitchen cupboards and gym facilities, although the TCHC board has final approval over any decisions made. The

300 process encourages democratic skills like public speaking in order to convince other tenants of particular priorities, and participants come to see the good of the community as more important than their own goals. According to one expert, PB is a tool that can reverse the decline of democratic participation at a local level ("Participatory Budgeting";

Schugurensky 4).

However, PB presents contradictions. On the one hand, it allows greater participation and control over spending priorities, and the years-long process of consultation is a way to build democratic capacities (5). On the other hand, it can also be seen as a means to reconcile tenants to neoliberal policy. It was framed specifically as a management response to cutbacks in the 1990s, allowing tenants to decide where to allocate limited funds. Sacrifice is part of the process: not all proposals win approval from other tenants (Lerner 9). As one tenant said, "When you are sitting in your own community, you don't understand why they don't fix things or why you can't have the things you want... With this budget process, people began to see how limited the funding was and the need for it out there" (10). Rather than organizing to resist the cutbacks, the process framed the cutbacks as inevitable. This is reinforced by the paltry amount allotted to PB: the $1.8 million is a small proportion of the annual $138 million in capital costs, let alone the $564 million operating budget, and certainly a tiny amount compared to the

$300 million backlog of needed repairs ("2007 Financial Summary"; OCAP "Stop").

The problem of incorporation within power structures exists in Brazil as well, even where implemented by left-wing governments. When PB was scaled up, it enabled internalization of neoliberal priorities: "the dilemmas of running the government and

301 balancing social needs have been pushed onto the citizens in this process while creating a lot of legitimacy for redistributive platforms" (Baiocchi "Thoughts On"; Lerner 12).

Redistribution itself has been hampered at larger levels by the government's compromises with rightist forces and the IMF (Baiocchi "The Workers' Party"). After the

PT implemented neoliberal measures, the party went down to defeat in the 2004 municipal elections, notably in Porto Alegre. The social basis for implementing PB may have remained but disillusionment had set in (Morais and Saad-Filho 27). Neoliberalism disoriented the Brazilian left itself, with splits from within the PT due to disagreements about whether the radical left should remain a part of the PT government (Bensaid, Lousa and Lowy).

Most of the self-critiques by PB advocates are around the process: the technical difficulties in designing ways to allow the greatest number of people to participate effectively (Schugurensky 6; Lyons 12; Wampler 30). These criticisms are valid but misdirected: the effectiveness of PB as a tool to counter the neoliberal agenda, which created the conditions that PB respond to, is rarely mentioned. Once activists have accepted the external limits of how the market operates, concerns about perfecting the process outweigh those about changing the broader political context, if only because fine- tuning the mechanisms of the experiments is so time-consuming.

Worse, the political capacities enabled by PB can be demobilized once the external limits to budgeting are reached, as seen in Porto Alegre's rejection of the PT municipal government. It is not an accident that institutions like the World Bank, itself responsible for implementing the neoliberal agenda, are strongly pro-PB, calling it an

302 "innovative mechanism which aims to involve citizens in the decision-making process of public budgeting" (McNally "Another World" 20; "Participatory Budget"). In a classic, if unintended, statement of the principles of reformism, Wampler frames the ideological goals of PB, calling it a "problem... that uninformed citizens may select policies that do not conform to the constraints placed on the government (i.e. participants vote to spend far more resources than are available)." Luckily, "most participants seem to be aware that

PB programs overall impact will be limited by revenue and authority constraints placed on the government" (17).

The "uninformed citizens" could be viewed as better-informed than the administrators who, having accepted neoclassical distributional limits, are willing to accept and implement capital's agenda. The "authority constraints" are the questions that

PB must never be allowed to pose, yet they maintain capitalist order. Speaking of local food politics in Belo Horizonte, a former city worker explains that "it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us"

(Lappe 6). However, it is not true that the forces of capital want to be "problem-solving partners" with their workforce, or indeed that capitalist government can be "accountable to us." In fact, the rhetoric of partnership has allowed the Brazilian Workers Party to push through neoliberal reforms that have impoverished millions (Sanchez, Kinas and Leite).

Mobilizing over distributional campaigns may pose the question of effective political organization, as Edel suggests (7). But PB is limited by the fact that these

303 campaigns accept distributional controls. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

(OCAP), a community organization composed of anti-poverty activists, does not.

OCAP's campaign in TCHC properties has mobilized tenants against austerity by publicizing dilapidated conditions in TCHC properties and calling mass meetings to demand repairs from building managers ("TCHC: Fight"; Toronto Tribune). OCAP has also fought proposed sell-offs of TCHC properties in high-rent neighbourhoods (OCAP

"Stop"). Most importantly, OCAP has framed political demands for the TCHC, putting the state of disrepair into a neoliberal context. The organization demands the TCHC build new social housing to address the 10-year waiting list and conduct outstanding repairs, it condemns the deterioration of public housing as a strategy to encourage sell-offs and fights the targeting of non-status migrants within TCHC ("TCHC: Our Demands").

OCAP has also mobilized against abuses of power by TCHC private security ("51

Division"). OCAP's campaigns have also had success in getting funds committed. At one apartment complex, OCAP demands led to $9 million of repairs - more money allocated than in four years of PB ("Toronto Housing"; "A Short History"). Unlike PB, OCAP has no ambiguity about the role of local municipal budgets in reinforcing the political rule of capital.

The Special Diet Campaign

Mass resistance can indeed start locally. In 1995, the Ontario Conservative government cut its already-meagre welfare rates by 21.6 percent. At a time when monthly rent for a two-bedroom basement apartment cost $800 on average, a single mother of two received only $1,239 on welfare, leaving her just over $400 a month to

304 live on (Rebick). However, a legislative clause allowed patients with special diet needs to claim up to $250 more per month if they had one of a number of different health problems, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. In 2005, as part of its Raise The

Rates campaign, OCAP began to mobilize welfare recipients to receive the special diet claim. With the help of allied doctors, OCAP organized a protest on the grounds of the provincial legislature, at which doctors assessed and approved over 1000 welfare recipients for the claim. After this, the group organized regular mass Special Diet clinics.

The campaign mobilized the poor and highlighted the impact of systemic poverty. Gary

Bloch, a supporting doctor at St. Michaels Hospital in central Toronto, identified poverty as the largest risk factor for poor health (Sylvain). The Special Diet campaign addressed not just an absolute lack of food but also, by providing more income for housing, transport and other needs, the broader factors related to food insecurity. The campaign's success was repeated across the province, in much smaller towns like Belleville and

Trenton, where hundreds of recipients were signed up ("MPPs Office"). From a $2 million program in 2002, the Special Needs diet costs expanded to $25 million in 2005 and $200 million by 2010 (Levy).

In response, the provincial Liberal administration tightened the rules. It required doctors to specify exactly which health problems recipients suffered from, despite a complaint lodged with the Privacy Commissioner, stating that the intrusive nature of the new procedures would violate welfare recipients' privacy over health concerns ("MD

Launches"). Pressure began to be applied to doctors to refuse to sign the forms; welfare bureaucrats were given the right to decide if a health condition was valid, rather than

305 medical professionals; and individuals began to be targeted for fraud (Wong; Belkov;

"City of Toronto"). In Toronto, welfare is administered by the municipal government, leading to refusals by City officials to process claims ("Powerful Demonstration").

Although admitting that it was unsafe to live on welfare, the Minister for Community and

Social Services refused to change the restrictions, saying the public would not support the

"welfare abuse" that the Special Diet represented (Sylvain). This deflection has been abetted by local news sources reporting unsubstantiated allegations of Special Needs claimants driving new vehicles or earning $65,000 per year (Mandel).

The Special Diet campaign shifted millions of dollars from government accounts directly to poor people. OCAP managed to increase the number of recipients from 5,300 to 31,000, during 2002 to 2007 (Mandel). Even spread among thousands of people, the money helped the survival capacities of poor people, as evidenced by how hard recipients were willing to fight to retain it: for example, anti-poverty activists campaigned with a diabetic 54 year old Sudbury resident to receive $100 extra per month (Belkov). This would be a form of direct-action Keynesian demand stimulus, were it not for OCAP's ability to build the political capacities of poor people themselves. When the program has come under attack, OCAP and its allies have mobilized across the province to defend it; in Toronto, OCAP has mobilized 250 people to protest the restrictions at municipal welfare offices, while provincially the group has built alliances with a union federation to protect the Special Diet ("Powerful Demonstration"). Rather than an act of charity,

OCAP argues that unions should support the Special Diet because it raises living standards for the whole working class. Unfortunately, the 2010 provincial budget

306 scrapped the program entirely, citing annual costs of $200 million (Monsebraaten). This demonstrates both the impact OCAP has had in confronting the neoliberal agenda, and the difficulties in broadening anti-poverty activism to include allies reliant on all aspects of the social wage.

The Raise The Rates campaign is resolutely local: it addresses the living conditions of poor people directly, in communities across the province. However, it is not localw/, because it targets neoliberal policy at all levels; the immediate and ongoing response from elected government, bureaucracy and media speaks to its efficacy. By demonstrating the anti-poor bias of a government willing to refuse poor people $250, it displays the harsh, anti-human agenda of neoliberalism. Unlike UA, it does not counsel poor people to further compensate for the structures that marginalize them; it does not suggest prefigurative or ethical strategies to avoid a confrontation. Rather, it undermines neoliberalism by mobilizing the political capacities of the marginalized to oppose it.

Building counter-power in Ontario: the Days of Action and the global justice movement

Activist groups grow or shrink along with the movements themselves. But they have a special role to play as incubators of skills and political ideas, providing continuity between different struggles and becoming sites of counter-power for the broader left. To create consistent poles of attraction, it is necessary to build the forces of resistance in ever-greater numbers (Sears "A Renewed").

Activists have built these poles of attraction across Canada many times: two examples include the Ontario Days of Action during the mid-1990s and the global justice

307 movement of the late 1990s-early 2000s. The full narrative of these events from the point of view of participants has yet to be told, and this chapter cannot do justice to the strategic issues that those movements posed. However, a brief sketch of their trajectory suggests salient issues about organizing at and beyond the local level.

The Ontario Days of Action arose after 1995 because of newly-elected

Conservative premier Mike Harris' neoliberal model. Harris promised 30 percent cuts in provincial taxes, 22 percent cuts in welfare programs, the introduction of workfare

(forced labour for welfare benefits), the end of employment equity and across-the-board cuts to social services like education and health care (Janigan). In response, the Ontario

Federation of Labour (OFL) and coalitions of community groups began to plan one-day general strikes in cities across the province, culminating in a two-day general strike in

Toronto on October 25-26,1996. The Toronto strike shut down most public services, many private companies and brought 250,000 people onto the streets outside the provincial legislature, the stock exchange, the Ministry of Education and other institutions (Eberle and Shore). After the success of these actions, which consistently grew in size, many activists felt a province-wide general strike was the next logical step.

However, the unofficial Pink Paper group in the OFL - private sector unions, headed by the United Steel Workers of America - prioritized electing the social democratic New

Democratic Party, and pushed for one-off Days of Actions in smaller cities again (Sears

"Activism"). Despite a 125,000-strong illegal teachers' strike against provincial cuts to education in 1997, and a rally of tens of thousands at the legislature that featured calls for a general strike, the movement began to shrink (Ferguson). Despite impressive mass

308 mobilizations, the Days of Action were ultimately used as moral pressure tools by the labour leadership to obtain a better bargaining position with government and support the

NDP, rather than support the creation of grassroots counter-power (Sears "Activism").

These questions were posed differently during the global justice movement, which began publicly at the protest at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in

Seattle, November 1999 ("Bring The Struggle"). A product of months of organizing by the largely anarchist Direct Action Network, the Seattle protests took the WTO officials and media by surprise and re-invigorated the anti-capitalist movement. They were significant for linking a myriad of local issues, such as farm subsidies, the ecological impact of agribusiness, labour, etc. to opposition to the representatives of states and financial institutions meeting at the summit (Solnit et al.).

This approach had strengths and limitations. Its clear advantage over localist politics was showing how micro-level exploitation was embedded in specific structures and institutions of capitalist power. Activists could then confront those institutions' forums and demand their closure. The events brought thousands of people into more direct confrontation with these power structures, despite their formal affiliations to more traditional political formations: for example, protests at the Summit of the Americas in

Quebec City, in April 21-22,2001, attracted activists from the Green Party of Ontario, numerous NGOs and trade unions (Bonser 10; Bender and Esmonde 6). The global justice movement showed that protests have more than symbolic power: they can disrupt business-as-usual for the ruling class representatives present, build a sense of collective power among activists, reveal the punitive capacity of the capitalist state and provide

309 opportunities for activists to meet, debate and work together (6).

Protests also pose concrete strategic questions about the nature of power: at the

Summit of the Americas, 5000 activists marched to the fence surrounding the conference in order to tear it down and confront attendees directly, while trade union leaders marched tens of thousands of members to a distant parking lot to hear 22 speeches (Jones

11). This displayed the fear of unions of both confrontation and losing of control over their members. In the event, radicals attempted to divert part of the larger crowd to protest at the fence. In a political context of rising struggle, socialists could intervene effectively in protests that, while dominated by reformist leaders, pose political questions that go beyond official tactics (M. 27).

Security forces at the summits grew more aggressive in response to the larger mobilizations, culminating in vicious attacks at the G8 summit at Genoa in July 2001, where police beat and tortured detainees and killed one demonstrator (Amnesty).

However, this did not stop plans for further mobilizations, which took place in

Washington DC in April 2002 and Kananaskis in June 2002, while further mobilizations continue to the present (Seal; M. 27; Global Policy Forum). However the World Trade

Centre attacks of September 2001 began to disrupt the movement, as mainstream labour leaders reaffirmed their patriotism and explicitly repudiated direct-action protests, and the tentative link between far left and social democratic milieus came apart (M. 27).

Some radicals understood the need to go beyond demonstrating at summits. Even before the Summit of the Americas protest, there was an explicit recognition that direct- action protest would be only partially effective without linking to struggles in

310 communities and workplaces. It also needed to build broader anti-capitalist organizations that could develop those campaigns outside of high-profile events ("The Enemy"). This would fulfill Rosa Luxemburg's demand for capacity-building, winning political and economic demands through the efforts of activists themselves (M. 29).

These efforts continue. In Ontario, the Rebuilding The Left initiative began in

2000, as 700 activists from unions, social justice and community groups and socialist organizations came together to strategize building new political capacities, with a focus on "extra-parliamentary focus... community, workplace and street-level mobilization against neo-liberalism", linked to existing mobilizations and advancing an anticapitalist politic (McNally "Rebuilding The Left"). Initiatives also took place in cities across

Canada, including Vancouver and Winnipeg (Offley 9). In 2000, OCAP initiated the

Ontario Common Front to mobilize allies against neoliberal cutbacks. Activists held discussions with local trade unionists and community groups on how to build militant mass actions (Common Front Working Group). Similar questions were also posed by activists within the NDP, who in 2002 attempted to form a left-wing bloc through the

New Politics Initiative and were defeated by the party leadership (Rao).

While there is no space here to assess these movements' successes and challenges, efforts to build non-sectarian organizations continue. The upsurge in anti-war organizing at the beginning of the second Gulf War brought millions of people onto the streets ("Building The Movement"). This was an embryonic show of counter-power that was not reflected in long-term organizational gains. On a smaller scale, the Greater

Toronto Workers Assembly initiative of 2010 has brought together activists from many

311 different political tendencies to create united forms of anti-capitalist activism (Workers

Assembly).

Conclusion

Localism arose out of the crisis of the capitalist state, which, as a mechanism of class rule of the bourgeoisie, needed to find new political tools to organize production and reproduction. It found those tools in neoliberalism, for which localism has accomplished different, complementary tasks. Localism provides a basis for post-

Keynesian socialization, mobilizing the values of community and solidarity in the service of neocommunitarianism. It replaces government redistributive action by downloading responsibility to those communities which are most damaged by capital flight. By encouraging illusions in the potential of social, micro-enterprise to undercut large firms, localism has also proven an effective ideological tool to confuse a systemic analysis of capital and co-opt potential oppositions. The localist plan for social transformation, a slow adding-up of communities and enterprises adhering to localist principles, would put it in direct conflict with large capital or lead to its co-optation. It is not possible "to construct an unbroken chain of continually growing reforms leading from the present social order to socialism" - still less, leading to localism (Luxemburg "Reform" 87).

How localism, which does not even attempt broad-scale social reforms, is supposed to succeed where social democracy's mobilization of state resources failed, is never articulated.

Despite their widely varying strategic perspectives, what Proudhon and Bernstein share with localism is a substitution of morality for an analysis of capitalist political

312 economy. This roots localism firmly in the nineteenth century Utopian socialist tradition: the "basing of socialism on the moral notion of justice, on a struggle against the mode of distribution instead of against the mode of production... the effort to graft the

'cooperative principle' on capitalist economy... were actual theories of the proletarian class struggle" (107). When even a radical critique like Holloway's founders on its inability to formulate strategic considerations, anticapitalists are drawn into experiments that remain highly labour-intensive examples of propaganda. The dangers of voluntarism put the entire responsibility for social change onto the individual. Any agency gained from the notion of capital as fragile is swept away by the enormity of the task or turned into a moralism towards those with the wrong behavioural choices.

However the repeated failures of "moral action" to stem either exploitation or war suggests that the question is political. As Lebowitz argues, "the axis of revolutionary thought is... other ways of organizing our reproduction as species on this planet... this other world [is] not a projection into the future, not as one model others have to conform to, but as a social force emerging in the present" (245). Thus we can consider

Luxemburg's boast that "there can be no socialism outside of Marxist socialism" (130), not because Marxist theory is morally superior to utopianism, but because its critique is immanent. A transformative politics bases itself on current, existing forces and determines what their potential might be. As Bensaid argues, this understanding may have been blurred by historical defeats, but it remains applicable.

The most important aspect of this legacy is its insistence on the political capacity of the proletariat. Luxemburg warns that "the chain breaks quickly, and the paths that the

313 movement can take from that point are many and varied" (87). This does not mean waiting for a revolution; "on the contrary, the essence of revolutionary tactics is to recognize the direction of this [antagonistic capitalist] development and then, in the political struggle, to push its consequences to the extreme" (89). The social contradictions must be revealed and resisted. Therefore she rejects all social economy schemes whose only ends are the creation of micro-alternatives: if these reforms "are considered as instruments for the direct socialization of the capitalist economy, they lose not only their supposed effectiveness, but also cease to be a means of preparing the working class for the proletarian conquest of power" ("Reform" 86).

This is not a criticism of survival strategies: the proletariat has every right to reproduce its labour power in whatever way possible. But asserting this right does not help determine how to change the conditions for reproduction. This requires an understanding of political economy, and social anarchist traditions like LM acknowledge the role of the existing capitalist state in enforcing the rule of capital (Bookchin 27).

Bookchin provides goals for a revivified socialist movement, calling for "the development of serious organizations, a radical politics, a committed social movement, theoretical coherence, and programmatic relevance" (19). This is another form of democratic, grassroots socialism. As part of the struggle to gain power, activists can create political counter-institutions to deal directly with community problems. This is very different from the internalization of market priorities demanded by Solidarity

Economics, or the post-revolutionary schemes for social organization of Parecon that do not provide political tools to achieve them. These linkages show the potential for

314 socialists and social anarchists to find common ground in anti-capitalist struggle.

Thus there is a fundamental difference between local, postcapitalist alternatives and anticapitalist political struggles: the former avoid challenging capitalist power structures, while the latter attempt to restrict them directly. If they avoid capital, local experiments are doomed to being marginal; mimicking the party politics many localists so oppose, advocates must console themselves with having the proper prefigurative line reflected in their work and lifestyles. Confronting and restricting capital means engaging with workers' concerns as they exist right now, not setting up alternatives and cajoling others to join.

There is nothing anti-local about socialism. Small is neither ugly nor beautiful; the question is "whether the small units are to be capitalist or socialist in orientation and intention; and whether they are seen as ends in themselves or integrated with a more universal system" (Kovel 185). Albo concurs that building non-capitalist organizational alternatives must be grounded in communities. The local is a political necessity because local organizing encourages democratic capacities. Since local spaces are embedded in international circuits of capital, local movements must also be "international in their thinking, linkages and solidarities" ("Obstacles" 41). They must create the political capacities to confront global institutions of capitalist power: "building a sustainable and relevant movement will require global justice activists to move beyond the mere recognition of links between global and local, to the use of organizing methods that build these links" ("Bring the Struggle"). Abandoning a non-confrontational, reformist concept of the local means expanding, not restricting the scope for political action. The Special

315 Diet campaign and the attempts to construct movements of counter-power in Ontario meet Luxemburg's criteria, creating demands that simultaneously build political capacities and point out the inability of capital to be organized to meet human need, at any scale. The fight for social reforms must contain a revolutionary strategy at its heart, confronting the capitalist social relations that localism evades.

316 CONCLUSION: FURTHER QUESTIONS

This dissertation has begun an investigation of questions that need to be more fully explored. Ideologically, how does the recent emphasis on urban professionals as the motor force for urban investment and development shape localist politics? Given that the new petty bourgeoisie does not act alone in promoting localism, what is the precise shape of localist coalitions when, for example, neighbourhood associations and unions work together to stop Big Box retail outlets?

Technically, the impact of commodity life cycles on carbon emissions, human and ecological health is complex and must be studied more closely, particularly by those who support democratic social coordination of production. This is a way to rescue the question of social provision from both uncritical boosters of and detractors from technology, and to concretely address the strengths and limitations of small-scale production.

Politically, localism is a relatively new mobilizing force: the local food movement, in particular, has only achieved mass appeal in the last decade. What is the relation of the localist movements in the Global North to more oppositional movements, and how do localist movements build the political capacities of their participants? Are there examples where socialist, social-anarchist or radical participants have worked with a localist movement to broaden its priorities?

It is hoped that this dissertation poses questions that can be investigated by others who want to build anti-systemic social movements, in order to challenge the contradictory, inherent drives of capital and appropriate the tremendous achievements of the social forces of production for human, democratic ends.

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