Grassroots Activism

Lecture 1

I thought I would suggest initially looking at Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

CSA is a type of pact between producers and consumers in which the latter provide finance and other assistance, guarantee purchases, and have a certain right of say. In the United States there are already more than three hundred CSA farms. Similar initiatives in Europe are less uniform and less integrated, but they include the German and Swiss producer-consumer co-operatives (PCCs), as well as the so-called ‘subscription farming’ in Britain. They teach (mainly) urban people how to support small local farmers who farm with wisdom, caring for local soils, waters and environments.

The point of all grassroots organizations in the Subsistence Perspective is to get away from centralized, top-down organization. This of course means that the wheel tends to get invented over and over again, but time, despite the Grand American Dream, does not cost anything in real values. However, umbrella organizations are beginning to appear, like the American group National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, which act as information clearing houses. Similar groups are beginning to appear also in Europe, Australia/New Zealand, and Britain. There’s no point in mentioning Asia, Africa or South America, as three quarters or more of their populations have always practiced community supported agriculture – they call it peasantry. Small is beautiful, and CSAs are small, semi-communal co-operative efforts which encourage the family farmer (peasant) both economically and ideologically to resist agribusiness and produce fresh, untainted food produced without any undue stress on the environment.

Grassroots activism often holds a connotation of unlettered peasants being revolting, but today this is far from accurate. I was watching one of our local TV commentary shows tonight, which pointed out the remarkable success of Community Banks in Australia. Since the first franchise was given, backed by a former co-operative building society which had transformed itself into one of our smallest banks, almost 100 such franchises have sprung up, 1000 are being assessed at the moment, and the seeding bank has become the fastest growing bank in the country. These banks were begun because the major banking conglomerates were 'rationalizing' - cutting staff, limiting face-to-face transactions, and closing many rural and suburban branches. People hated it, and the result, despite massive critical predictions of doom and gloom, has been stunning. It has reached the point where suburban community banks have come into existence- not just small country towns. No-one can get any of the original critics to comment now. The same phenomenon has, of course, been occurring in the Third World for thirty years, starting with the Grameen banks in Bangladesh, which now has been replicated several times in India, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Latin America, and to everybody's amazement, Canada and the USA, where there are now several hundred of them. This is creative, grassroots anti-global resistance.

Every local initiative can give good use to the information that others, with similar concerns, may provide to them. They may also benefit from their alliances with other men and women struggling against similar threats in their own spaces. The solidarity they may obtain through these linkages may be of critical importance for their concrete struggle. But the danger for groups like this is that they will let their successes go to their heads, and/or think they can take on global corporations - they can't. To do so, you become what you fight. If you fight fire with fire, you become an arsonists; if you fight violence with violence, you become a thug (a point President Shrub Wayne could take note of); if you fight politics with politics, you become a hypocrite. Indians in Mexico have ceased to accept the state as a point of reference for their political dreams. They can deal with state representatives coming into their spaces to handle some inter-communal conflicts or to present their claims – something they accepted or settled for in the past with all dominant structures. But they do not adopt state systems as their own: they do not assume these as the horizon of their own political conceptions. We can learn from this process. Civil disobedience doesn't have to be violent, as Gandhi proved fifty years ago with satayagraha (non-violent dissent). Render unto Caesar only what you absolutely have to by law, and otherwise live your life as detached from the political system as you possibly can.

Lecture 2

Possibly the best-known grassroots protest in Asia is the Chipko Movement, where (mostly) women hug trees to stop them from being cut down. Western commentators tend to claim it as both a feminist and an environmentalist movement. Certainly it has strong environmental aspects and has been adopted by environmental groups, but this was never a deliberate motivation. The feminist claim is a bit spurious. One feminist suggested that hugging the trees represented ‘the broad circle of concerns that women understand’; people closer to the movement suggest instead that it is an example of Gandhian satayagraha (non-violent protest) more closely related to the Gandhian roots of the protest tradition in India. The reason it is mostly women is also one of the reasons why there is a protest at all. Commercial forestry, run on Western silvicultural premises, has destroyed most of the local villagers’ subsistence base, forcing most of the men, as the Green Revolution has elsewhere in India, to emigrate to other regions to find wage labor. The social cohesion of the villages has been shattered as a result.

The Chipko Movement could be put in the Subsistence Perspective or Globalization threads, since it affects both of them as well. The Chipko movement is not just an ecological protest, a function and intent ascribed to it by Western environmentalists, but instead is the manifestation of local protest over long-term and continuing exploitation by government and business generally. Its concerns were primarily with the deterioration in lifestyle and subsistence issues experienced by the Hill peoples, and the protest followed a long tradition of anti colonial and anti-government resistance over two hundred years. The Movement is ongoing, but it has racked up several major triumphs to date, despite facing both governmental and commercial opponents, and the entire weight of Western globalization imperatives. Even sympathetic development initiatives do not support the Movement, because most of them are trapped in the same development paradigm as are Chipko’s enemies. Attempts to soften the impact by means of financial initiatives miss the point – traditional and subsistence peoples do not separate economic from social and spiritual issues, so the promise of economic support means little to them. The processes used by commercial forestry could almost be deliberately designed to bring about deforestation. What works in cold climate forests in the North is disastrous in the humid conditions of the tropical rain forests. The transformation of mixed natural forests into uniform monocultures allows the direct entry of tropical sun and rain, baking the forest soils dry in the heat, washing the soils off in the rain. Less humid conditions are the reason for rapid retrogression of tropical forest regions. The recent fires of Kalimantan are largely related to the aridization caused by the conversion of rainforests into plantations of eucalyptus and acacias. Floods and drought are created where the tropical forest had earlier cushioned the discharge of water.

The roads needed to bring out the commercial timber themselves caused considerable damage, not least of which was the accessibility it meant for tourists; one of the commercial applications was the tapping of resin, but with overuse of this resource the older trees died out, so the companies took the short-sighted choice of tapping younger trees, causing them to die and deforestation to accelerate; this resulted in the appropriation of the few stands set aside for indigenous use; the loss of large areas of formerly subsistence forest has forced most of the men into emigrant wage labor, further weakening the community cohesion; and even the small amount of income villagers could earn from tapping was threatened, both by the decrease in output and by corruption in the license-granting procedures. If this were not enough, to the embarrassment of Forest Department officials, who funded the research, Indian ecologists have found that the ideology of ‘sustained yield’ supposedly practiced in these forests is simply not attained – the output from the commercial stands regularly and significantly exceeds the new growth, thus further accelerating the deforestation process (Guha 1993:85).

In 1970, serious floods afflicted the region, bringing with them massive landslides which destroyed a number of villages and took many lives. It became painfully obvious that the villages worst affected were those lying down slope from the clear felled forests. The causal relationship between increasing erosivity and floods on the one hand, and mass-scale felling of trees on the other, was recognized. This accelerated the local resistance, which came to a head as what we now know as Chipko when the Indian Forest Department gave a stand of trees to a sports equipment manufacturer over the bid of local co-operatives, and blocking the felling of these trees became the first activist response.

What brings about these disasters is the arrogance of Western thought systems which ignores the knowledge of hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error experience – and calls it ‘primitive’. It is a interesting insight to note that commercial forestry considers that a managed, limited species, even-aged forest is ‘normal’, and that the natural forest habitat is ‘abnormal’, a concept found in forestry textbooks. It’s as though we see forests like an assembly line, or a timber mine. It’s not hard to see how this makes biodiversity abnormal from a Western point of view, another point which I will bring up when I do the promised post on the Green Revolution. In fact, this post is a deliberate introduction to that.

To subsistence peasants, the forest is food, fuel, fodder, fertilizer, fiber and medicine. Rural inhabitants rarely chop down trees; most collect dead branches or lop them from trees, and when fuel wood is in short supply, they tend to economize or to switch to other fuel, such as cow dung, crop stems and husks, and weeds. The pressure of fuel wood demand comes, if anything, from commercial rather than subsistence consumption. It should be remembered that these forests were preserved and protected for centuries by the same local villagers, and were decimated (within decades) only when villagers lost control of the forests to urban commercial interests. So much for them being a danger to their commons. Subsistence, or social, forestry has as its priorities the maximization of the sustainable production of diverse forms of biomass for all those things I mentioned before, food, fuel etc. – use value; commercial forestry, on the other hand, seeks only woody biomass suitable for commercial use, like pulp for paper or wood for furniture – exchange value, or profit. The two cannot effectively overlap, because in the commercial view, many of the use-value products of the forest are at best a nuisance, and at worst a menace, and therefore have to be removed. Scientific forestry will always be damaging – because of inadequate knowledge or information, because of mismanagement, or because of the susceptibility of managers to commercial interests, but most importantly because of its basis in an instrumental attitude towards nature – that is, that nature is there to be plundered. This is the Western Way.

Lecture 3

It is obvious that ‘reinventing the commons’ in local communities in industrialized societies will appear to be an almost impossible task, at least at the present juncture. And yet precisely this is already happening in a number of social experiments in Europe and the US, partly out of necessity (because the welfare state no longer takes care of a growing number of people), partly because people on their own want to try out new forms of producing and living that are not dictated by the logic of private property and accumulation. These CSA's and such are found all over. In the United States alone there are now over 300 such farms, and they are appearing in Germany and Switzerland (under the name of Producer-Consumer Co-operatives or PCCs), and in Britain as ‘subscription farming’ (Bennholdt-Thompson 1999:104). The motivations are mixed, but in many respects there is an element of deliberate ‘delinking’ from the dominant market system involved, along with a desire for farm-fresh, organically produced food, and perhaps an element of being ‘in touch’ with nature. Barter circles, of which the LETS programs are the most common present manifestation, also began in urban settings in the USA in response to the economic downturn under Reaganomics, and were transported to Britain where Thatcherism created the same economic conditions, and from thence to many other parts of the developed world, especially Germany where there are over 300 such groups registered. They are an imitation of the reciprocal economics of subsistence societies. In the 1990s some of these groups worldwide took on something of the nature of CSAs with a move toward extending their system to the self-provisioning field.

There are two kinds of grassroots activisms, the sort of self-sustaining project I started the thread with, or the boycott/demonstration route, which it now appears is forbidden under the Homeland Security Act. So, I'm going to return to the first type, with a foray into alternative economies. Two of the most insidious problems facing people today are the disintegration of once close, relatively secure communities and the growing supremacy of the global economy and market. Local and even national policies take a back seat to international trade agreements and the ‘needs’ of the corporate-controlled economy. The result: more people scrambling for fewer, lower paying jobs, who are then forced to make hard choices between paying rent or buying food. Fear and despair take hold, creating a culture of distrust and isolation.

Part of the reason is that although a community moves a cascade of money, employing local people, most of it gets spent outside the community, perhaps on a holiday, perhaps to import tools, equipment, foodstuffs. Each community exists in the world in a more or less precarious balance between its income and expenditure. Hence the drive to export goods to increase income, and the incentive to shop locally, to keep the money in local circulation. But the global nature of economics now makes it harder and harder to keep money in the local economy. Even foodstuffs are mostly sold by chain supermarkets, and all but the wages (and a few local products) goes into the companies' accounts elsewhere. The result is less local money, less jobs, fewer people can afford to start businesses, which increases the lack of local money, creates less jobs.

There are two characteristics of conventional money that render it ineffective as a proper support for the local community. Conventional money, being universally distributable, has no inherent tendency to remain in circulation in any particular community. Conventional money, which is the essential lifeblood of the economy, derives from agencies external to the community. The combination of these factors causes excessive dependency upon circumstances external to the community and essentially beyond its control. No boundary conditions exist or can legitimately be created that retain conventional cash without detrimental consequences, such as trade restriction. However, it is entirely possible to create a specifically local currency that ensures a money supply to the community it serves, simply because the money is unusable, and thus unwanted, beyond that community. Local currencies have many advantages. While interactions in the conventional economy are impersonal, reinforcing individual isolation, interactions in a local money system rely on personal contact and therefore encourage friendship, trust, and ultimately a more secure community. In short, community currency is a wonderful tool to help us challenge the powers that be and take control of our local economies – and our lives. In the ensuing posts I will go into the other advantages, the various systems that have been or are being tried, and the disadvantages such as exist.

Lecture 4

Like those of the Great Depression, today’s community currencies are varied and diverse. Some are true currencies – that is, they physically exist and are traded for goods and services like federal dollars. Other systems operate on barter or work exchange networks with no physical currency exchanged. Still others resemble the scrip common during the Depression. The ‘rules’ for these currencies also vary, depending on the needs and desires of community members. What they have in common is a commitment to community building, to supporting what’s local, and to gaining a greater understanding of economics’ and money’s role in our daily lives. Community money systems remain small in terms of a broader economic impact. None of the systems is large enough to demonstrate whether they can prevent the drain of wealth out of a community – a frequently mentioned goal. Yet they give ordinary people the power to decide what is of value to them, and to make that value real through an economic mechanism circulating the goods, services and social support they care about.

Local currencies like SEL, time banks and LETS in Europe – and the highly successful printed notes known as ‘hours’ in the USA – are all in their different ways able to rescue a sense of local community. They rebuild people’s confidence, and they rediscover local resources – often people’s skills – that the global economy simply forgets. When a community has its own currency, full employment can be available to anyone who wants to work and has a skill or service, of any nature, that is required by that community. It need no longer be the case that there are jobs that need doing and that people who wish to work are kept idle for want of money. This is a natural consequence of the necessary recirculation of the local money; in contrast, conventional money will generally drain out of the community to the cheapest available source of labor or goods. A community with its own currency has the capacity to adopt and maintain coherent and relevant directions of development with minimal dislocation by external events. And even the mainstream has caught on to the concept.

Loyalty points and air miles are playing an increasing role in our lives. And in case you didn’t think this is money: until recently, Northwest Airlines used to pay their entire worldwide PR account in frequent flyer points (Boyle 2001). Given that one of the chief goals of a local currency is to offset a shortage of national currency, it is unsurprising that a large number of ‘local money’ initiatives arose during the years of the Great Depression. Typical of these was the Larkin Merchandise Bond issued in 1933 by Larkin and Company of Buffalo, New York. The bonds were used to pay employees of the company and were accepted in any Larkin retail outlet in the USA, as well as by many other businesses. While the bonds were in circulation the original $36,000 issue was turned over sufficiently to facilitate the sale of $250,000 worth of merchandise. This and other scrip issues gradually declined toward the end of the Depression as official currency became more readily available. However, this does not diminish the proven success of local money in stimulating a local economy (Danson & Pacione 1999).

The value of a local currency is enhanced if it is accepted by local authorities in payment for rent, taxes and other services. Popular confidence in the currency may also be heightened if it is redeemable at par with national currency. However, in order to promote its use as a local medium of exchange, some form of discounting mechanism or negative interest rate may be appropriate. It all depends on what the community wants, but commonly, these currencies are at par with the national currency.