Planet Earth is experiencing a five-alarm emergency, yet our political systems are paralyzed and incapable of responding.
Unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, and other climate disasters are overwhelming us. Inequality is at a historic high, with 3,000 billionaires shaping our political systems and civil societies. Our once open and vibrant democracies are mutating into dictatorships. Our economies, which were remarkably stable after World War II, continually careen between uncontrolled inflation and unemployment. The list of seemingly insoluble national and global problems is growing.
But we also believe there is a clear path forward that has received little attention. And that solution is localism: a commitment to place, supported through the decentralization of power, action, and our economies.
Around the world are exciting examples of localism’s success: communities increasingly able to feed themselves through greenhouses, vertical growing, and food sovereignty programs; urban organizations solving homelessness through tiny houses and community land trusts; cooperatives, nonprofits, and B Corps removing the walls between managers and workers; neighborhoods using cutting edge technologies to be self-reliant in energy and water. Localism is about accelerating the start-up, maturity, and spreading of these kinds of projects worldwide.
We believe that localism can not only provide a powerful new framework for solving our most pressing problems. It’s also a philosophy that offers a radically hopeful politics and opens new possibilities for cracking our calcified political systems, collaborating across ideological lines.
Localism is not utopian. It describes the reality of power for most of human history. And it can be seen today—however imperfectly—in the federalist structures of countries like Canada, Germany, and the United States. Perhaps the closest living example of localism is Switzerland, where the national government is so minor that almost no one can name its President, and yet the country ranks at the top of global rankings of economic, social, and environmental performance.
I like the direction, but a couple of things stand out to me. The most important is that there are absolutely no clear actions that almost anyone can take to move towards this. “Change X law” is not actionable for most people.
But there’s a larger issue here. Capitalism defines a fitness function, in the evolutionary sense. The “fitness” for survival in the capitalist system is maximization of capital. The more capital an organization can leverage, the longer it survives. The longer it survives, the more people it influences, the more it’s traits show up in future organizations.
This document fails to address the fact that this fitness function is ultimately the problem. The principles and practices try to constrain the behavior of the system, but the fitness function ultimately defines the behavior of the system. Within modern capitalism, we’ve seen every similar constraint be dismantled because the fitness function is ultimately the only thing that matters in any system. The side effects of the fitness function will eventually find a way to neutralize any constraint.
The fitness function is what has to change. What, exactly, is it that we want our society to do??
I think there is a fairly natural fitness function: make reproducing the system as easy as possible. In simple terms, “make parenting easier.” This potentially helps everyone once and some people more than that. This fitness function has a bunch of good side effects. You can’t reproduce an unsustainable system, so you have to solve (ecological, economic, etc) sustainability as a side effect. It’s also more “local” than “localism.”
If you, personally, choose to live by this fitness function (instead of the dominant market fitness function) you can make personal decisions and organize groups to realize this objective… and you can do that begging anyone in power to let you do it. Go babysit your friend’s kids. Make or buy dinner for them some time. Organize a free childcare collective, or even a sliding scale one. Even having a little bit of time can make the lives of parents way better, and thereby make the lives of kids better. This is literally why some people go to church. Start a stuff library where parents can borrow (and maybe never return, with no penalty) kids stuff so they don’t have to buy hundreds of socks, or diapers. Start a free diaper washing service. Listen to parents talk about their lives and figure out how you can help.
This is the core of mutual aid. The more stress you take off an overburdened parent, the better they’re able to parent, and the less likely their kid (or someone like them) will steal your shit or stab you in the future. It’s pretty simple. The parents you help are more likely to raise kids who will be able to contribute rather than detract, who will be a net benefit. Some of those kids will grow up and figure out how to cure diseases, or will take care of you when you get old. Show them compassion now, so they know what it looks like when they’re taking care of you.
When people finally ask you why you’re offering help, you walk them through the logic. Parents who get this support and understand why are much more likely to pay it back when they get out from under the burden of parenting. Kids who understand will grow up primed to pay it forward.
You can basically derive the rest of localism from that starting point. The thing that matters is the fitness function.
edit: Go start an anarchist movie night once or twice a month and offer free childcare, and you’ll turn at least a few parents in to anarchists just by way of offering free childcare.
I love this angle! That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate your detailed breakdown.
My main criticism of this piece is, as implemented, it still relies on a larger governing body of some sort to police inter-local conflict. If we just do away with federal government entirely, there’s nothing stopping a warlike locality from invading and conquering another to increase its territory and resources, and if that continues unchecked you just get another federal government. (Other examples abound, such as a locality upstream dumping toxic waste into a river that serves as drinking water for a locality downstream.)
If you don’t have a federal body those issues go unresolved, but if you do, the struggle becomes checking the power of said body and preventing it from taking away local sovereignty. And I don’t have any easy answers to that.
it still relies on a larger governing body of some sort to police inter-local conflict.
I don’t disagree, exactly, but I have a few thoughts on this. The first is just… “how is that different from now?” You’re just describing modern geopolitics. If we’re comparing two systems and they both have the same flaws but one has some benefits, then the flaws really don’t matter. This doesn’t put us any worse than we are now, and it actually makes things much better… which comes to the second point (not well addressed in the doc).
I think this is where people tend to fundamentally misunderstand conflict. War is incredibly resource intensive. Carrying out war ultimately makes the warring society untenable, and we’ve seen this with the collapse of every empire. There’s a section in The Art of War (I can’t remember exactly) that discusses logistics. Sun Tzu essentially says that each soldier deployed requires seven people in the field (growing grain, harvesting, etc) to support. Soldiers and equipment have only become more expensive for offensive deployment. Meanwhile, asymmetric warfare has decreased the cost of defense and campaigns to destabilize empires. Ursula K le Guin’s Always Coming Home touches on this point at the end (not to spoil it, for anyone down to take on the challenge but she argues that under some cases defense may not even be necessary at all).
A large empire may be able to maintain enough excess to support global oppression for decades or centuries, especially with complex financial manipulation. Bigger systems can just absorb more chaos without destabilizing quickly. I think of aquaponics, where the larger the tank the longer you have to adjust the system before critical failure: more water means more thermal mass, more oxygen in the water, more capacity to absorb waste before it becomes toxic. Small tanks can crash rapidly. A small leak can drain all the water. A broken pump can mean quickly running out of air or toxifying water. The system just doesn’t have room.
A local economy is the same. Russia may be able to survive an almost total economic blockade for 6 years (by current estimates), but it will still collapse (perhaps quite soon). How long could Cleveland Ohio survive such a blockade? Most major cities would collapse in less than a week.
So yes, this type of system requires federation and cooperation between localities but it doesn’t actually require a central authority. Which is a good thing, since we have no central authority now and we’ve never figured out how to have a top level central authority. There has never been a top level central authority globally. The best we’ve ever come up with were the League of Nations and the United Nations, and those both seem to have mostly failed for pretty much the same reasons.
Edit: The original text does touch on sanctions and blockades, but yeah, I read it as being vaguely liberal and the liberal solution of “we need a central authority” always runs out of turtles somewhere.
