From an Anarchism to a Democratic Confederalism, Part III
As face-to-face relationships deteriorate and real-life role models are replaced by distant, artificial images of perfection in mass media and in the hyperbolic world of social media, unhealthy comparison runs rife. These trends are associated with rising rates of disorders such as anorexia, anxiety, aggression and even suicide, while social isolation, domestic stress and increasing economic pressures have given rise to epidemics of depression and addiction.
Helena Norberg-Hodge
To many right now, the world in general and USA in particular have been an unholy sick place. Near the end of USA rule by a madman Nero-president, a worldwide virus takes hold; adults are forced to stay home from work and children home from school as everything from toilet paper to baker’s yeast vanishes from store shelves; citizens already struggling with everything from depression to obesity to addiction — a syndrome labelled “deaths of despair” by a team of researchers — see their problems compounded by isolation and fear; to top things off, the outcome of a presidential election, noncontroversial in any other epoch, results in the sacking of the nation’s capital by people who, for decades, were explicit about fomenting general insurrection, but who somehow surprised the people in charge.
Ironically, just as the pandemic eases, the one social ill in the USA seemingly mitigated by the Covid — mass shootings — re-emerges in force, as isolation restrictions vanish and things get back to… well, normal. With the change in politics, also returned to normal is liberal complacency, as the Obama-Biden fan club hastens a return to brunchy NPR culture; they look back on the 4 Trump years as a Duck-dynasty-fueled nightmare/anomaly that interrupted their cultural dream-bubble, and in doing so disconnect it from any historical and economic analysis that might possibly involve the educated liberal class, or might involve caring about an uneducated class who has been bypassed by capitalism and has been focused on the wrong enemy. To be fair, liberals probably realize it’s not necessarily over, as the right shows no signs of backing down, their only debate being on how best to integrate Trumpism without Trump, introducing a bevy of voter-repression schemes and fighting against the teaching of accurate history in K-12 schools (inaccurately labeled as “Critical Race Theory” to make it sound conspiratorial).
Despite the new face (actually, old face) in the executive office we are in the middle of a storm, and while we’re in it, it all seems too huge to understand, doesn’t it. I like this analogy of a storm; if you saw a tornado from far away, you’d know what it was, and you could even analyze it if you had the predisposition to do so; warm humid air is rising while cool air is falling, etc. But if you were in the middle of it, you might be pressed to understand what was happening all around you. I think that’s very much where we are at right now — we’re still in the middle, it’s big, and many of us can’t even tell that we are inside of it.
And it is huge, in fact, as the term “globalization” should suggest. Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of the book Ancient Futures (1991) and producer-director of the film The Economics of Happiness (2011), anticipated many of these developments, and was early in formulating a remedy. It’s something about which Norberg-Hodge should know, having lived in Ladakh, or Little Tibet in the Indian Himalayas, for over 4 decades. She arrived there just as the region opened up to tourism in 1975, but early enough to witness how things had been for centuries:
Although there was little money, there was no evidence of the kind of poverty one sees all over the so-called “developing” world — where people are hungry or malnourished, and have neither adequate shelter nor clean drinking water. In fact, throughout Ladakh I was told regularly: “We are tung-bos za-bos”, which means “we are self-sufficient, we have plenty to eat and drink”.
For the next twenty years I watched Leh turn into an urban sprawl. The streets became choked with traffic, and the air tasted of diesel fumes. “Housing colonies” of soulless, cement boxes spread into the dusty desert. The once pristine streams became polluted, the water undrinkable. For the first time, there were homeless people. The increased economic pressures led to unemployment and competition. Within a few years, friction between different communities appeared. All of these things had not existed for the previous 500 years.
Norberg-Hodge watched these changes occur simultaneously at several levels, as, over time, Bhuddists and Muslims who once got along began flaunting religion in each other’s faces. Food, no longer grown by the community but subsidized and imported through globalism’s gleaning of the world’s cheapest sources, made local farming uneconomic; no longer needing homegrown hands-on skills, people instead learned how to live in cities, as local culture was looked down upon and economic and political power were now centered in the capital instead of the household/village.
It was clear to me that the arrival of the global economy had created a pervasive sense of insecurity and disempowerment. On a practical level, the Ladakhis were becoming dependent on far-off manufacturers and centralised bureaucracies instead of on each other. Psychologically, they had lost confidence in themselves and their culture.
From there, the leap to authoritarianism is not a far one; “it is not hard to see how people who feel insecure and disempowered can turn to anger and extremism.” And Norberg-Hodge makes clear that, although she was in the right place at the right time to see the clear connection between globalization and societal decline/collapse, the process is one that all humans will endure, and its wake is the breeding grounds for authoritarianism; in keeping with the deterministic tenets of historical materialism, economics and survival drive changes in culture and politics.
Significantly, because of her immersion and perhaps because of her academic background (Norberg-Hodge was a grad student of Chomsky’s), Norberg-Hodge is firm about denying the ability of conventional (mainstream electoral) left or right politics to handle something so vast; the way to bring change “is not to simply vote for a new candidate within the same compromised political structure.” Rather, her remedy is a return to what she calls “localization” (I personally prefer the term “localism” for the movement and “localisation” for the process). To create localism, it is necessary to build a network of “face-to-face” local groups, to raise awareness about common interests, and to link divergent groups that retain “pro-democracy/anti-corporate” positions; in a 2018 paper, she speaks of seeing promise in La Via Campesina’s worldwide movement for local food sovereignty, and she sees promise in the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.
We need to start talking politics with one another – with those concerned about social justice and peace, those focused on unemployment, environmental issues, or spiritual and ethical values.
Examples in places as diverse as Fitzroy, Australia, Vermont, USA, Preston and Oxfordshire UK, and Brazil showcase things like free exchanges, culturally-derived immigrant workshops, decentralized renewable energy infrastructure, and community banking with its own currency. Norberg-Hodge refers to initiatives that many of us in USA urban areas may already know well, including food-based efforts like community gardens, farmers’ markets, and CSAs, saying that these developments “attest[s] to the fact that more and more people are arriving, in a largely common-sense way, at localization as a systemic solution to the problems they face.”
Hmm. Well, yes and no. Perhaps it depends upon how class is framed in the solution; in my experience, the local food initiatives and the farmer’s markets, CSAs, and the food wagons that accompany them are informed more by an urban artisanal culture of connoisseurship than by desire for systemic revolution; while giving a nod to sustainability and environmental responsibility, this movement often seems more to reflect a wish by a privileged class to partake of a sensibility that includes an abhorrence of mass-produced things in general. For those who didn’t live through it, the idea that late-1950s and early-1960s mass-produced products like Tang were craved by a privileged middle class seems unbelievable, as today, products like heirloom tomatoes, hand-made beers, and things unbranded, homemade, and personalized take the place of regulated products mass-produced by standardization (which itself revolutionized the unhealthy and unregulated industry written about by Sinclair Lewis in The Jungle).
To be sure, there are good aspects of the artisanal culture, and aspects of it that already place it within a localistic framework; as anthropologist Grant McCracken has observed, transparency and authenticity are parts of this kind of production, and crucially, local sourcing is built into its ethos. This last aspect especially provides a template for elevating localism, from an artisanal culture based on aesthetics, to one based on human need as an organizing principle. Yes, modern artisanal culture’s components already include an awareness of the detriments of global industrialized production, as emphasized in Michael Pollan’s popular 2006 Omnivore’s Dilemma, but right now this awareness is more of an aside, analogous to saving the planet by using LED light bulbs (rather than saving it by removing the institutions that create superabundances of cheap consumer goods through exploitation of cheap overseas sources of labor and production).
Okay then, if localism (based on need, not sophistication) should be front-and-center in, say, an artisanal food movement, how do we implement it? Norberg-Hodge:
We need to start talking politics with one another – with those concerned about social justice and peace, those focused on unemployment, environmental issues, or spiritual and ethical values. It means raising awareness of the common interest that unites single-issue campaigns and bridges left-right antagonism.
Fair enough. In fact, there have been aspects of localisation upheld by the right, including condemnation by conservatives of the WTO and about NAFTA; but usually rightist views having to do with localization are oriented more along isolationist and nativist lines than humanist ones. Norberg-Hodge’s piece above was written in 2018, and even then, the time for rational exchange between people believing in science and people believing in conspiracy was past; any glance in 2021 at the social-media feed of a mainstream newspaper of TV station suggests it’s even worse now. What about using the power of the current governments to get localism implemented? Similar to the paradox of the Marxist-Lennist, Norberg-Hodge references the extant power of the state to create a situation that ultimately intends to bypass the state:
the nation state remains the political entity best suited to putting limits on global business, but at the same time more decentralized economic structures are needed, particularly when it comes to meeting basic needs.
The fact is — and this is my personal speculation, and perhaps an extreme one — we won’t have to argue about using the help of large-scale structures or need to worry about “raising awareness” to promote localism. The world will solve the problem of promoting localism for us; we just need to be there to shape it. As said above, we are in a storm, and localism will be forced upon us by the inability of nation-state to mitigate the storm, as a mix of factors from climate change to pandemics to disrupted supply chains — all of these arguably emanating from the internal contradictions of capitalism of which Marx spoke — impose hardships globally.
Surely the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic with all of its disruptions has prepared us for a vision of what this could look like. When this happens — as it surely will at some point, whether 5 years or 200 years from now — an informed structural localism will be the key to keeping an intact humanistic society. We’ve seen such societies arise with success in times and in places that are remote from state authority, ranging from Rojava in war-torn northern Syria to the Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas; in such places, external conditions have permitted an environment for the anarchist and the humanist to make good things happen.
Are we naive and simplistic enough to hope for disaster so that the promise of local paradise can occur? That’s not the point; firstly, as activists we have no more choice in creating such conditions than we do in changing the weather; and secondly, if disaster were the condition for progress, Haiti would be a utopia by now. Do you think that the vastness of the state makes this point moot, that we should focus on elections, and that the nation-state creates the greatest good for the greatest number? Maybe it has and maybe it hasn’t, but when I look at the United States and see lives lost in decades-long wars ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, when I see wealth repeatedly destroyed and transferred through recurring financial crises with no repercussions to the wealthy who created them, I have to think there’s a better way; or at least we have to try for a better way. The political system of the United States and the power of capitalism may seem inescapable, but as Ursula K. Le Guin famously said, so once too did the divine right of kings.
From Norberg-Hodge: the way forward is so much more than voting for “a new candidate within the same compromised political structure.” Talking “with those concerned about social justice and peace, those focused on unemployment, environmental issues, or spiritual and ethical values” understates the amount of work to be done, but she’s right, except that these efforts need be elevated structurally to create local networks of affinity groups, such as many of those we already have in Columbia, Missouri. Perhaps you have such groups in your community as well.
These are groups that don’t just talk, but also do the hands-on mutual-aid work of food production and delivery, homelessness support, and disaster relief. When the state fails to pick up the pieces from the storm — speaking metaphorically here, but literally as well when it comes to things like Hurricane Katrina or the Paradise fires — networks comprised of mutual aid groups can be in place to facilitate the building blocks for a true humanistic localism. As activists and community members we may not have the ability to change the weather or vanish the storm, but we do have the ability to mitigate its effects, and to use the opportunity to create a better world.
This is part III of a 4 or 5-part series about moving from abstract anarchist principles towards a working humanist societal structure. In the next installment we examine how previous attempts in history have worked and how they have failed; and in the last essay of the series we will explore how these concepts could be realized specifically in the city of Columbia, Missouri, and what they might look like.
Notes
[1] Perhaps because of the audience, in her 2018 paper Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a curious misattribution about globalization to the left: “Many people, especially on the left, associate globalisation with international collaboration, travel and the spread of humanitarian values…” it seems here that she must be speaking of the liberal “left” (near-right Democrats) given that anarchists were among the first to take militant action against globalization during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
References
Localization: a Strategic Alternative to Globalized Authoritarianism by Helena Norbert-Hodge, Local Futures, May 12, 2018.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Case, Anne and Deaton, Angus, 2020. Princeton University Press.
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. Norbert-Hodge, Helena, 1992. Sierra Club Books.
the artisanal movement, and 10 things that define it by Grant McCracken, CultureBy.com, November, 2006.
The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Michael Pollan, 2007. Penguin.
In Seattle’s WTO protest, the seeds of today’s anti-globalist nationalism by Knute Berger, Crosscut.com, December 2, 2019.
Making our own history. White, Jonathan, 2021. Praxis press, 144 pp.
Zombie capitalism: Global crisis and the relevance of Marx. Harman, Chris, 2009. Haymarket Books, 424 pp.