GEOG 240: Day 18

1. GEOG 240: Day 18 Alternative Economic Geographies

2. Housekeeping Items • We need to schedule presentations on your projects. • A couple of brief comments on Gerald’s presentation: • He rightly emphasized the enormous speed of innovation over the past 10-15 years. • One area where the Internet has actually social capital and promoted economic alternatives is discussed in the following TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_currency_of_the_new_economy_is_trust.html.

3. Housekeeping Items • I wanted to follow up with a question I posed last time: where would each of you consider to be a desirable place to live and why? • Before we move on to Chapter 12, I wanted to read you a paragraph from a Canadian geography textbook and show you a couple of figures relevant to the last chapter.

6. Chapter 12 • The chapter starts with raising the question of whether capitalism has colonized the ‘lifeworld’ (the cognitive world in which we navigate our way through life). This is another way of talking about reification, where we take for granted as natural what is in fact socially constructed. Can we conceive that there is any alternative to capitalism, especially after the collapse of ‘communism’? • While capitalism is a social construct – i.e., something made by people – it is also enormously adaptable, even in the face of crisis.

7. Chapter 12 • Nonetheless, throughout its history there have been enormous resistance and opposition. This has taken a number of forms – including social democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism, and green politics/ deep ecology. • Some of these movements have been reformist (change from within) and some revolutionary (smash from without). • This tradition goes all the way back to the English Revolution of the 1640s. • Here’s a song written by Leon Rosselson about the Diggers.

8. The Diggers In sixteen forty-nine to Saint George's HillA ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people's willThey defied the landlords, they defied the lawThey were the dispossessed, reclaiming what was theirs "We come in peace," they said, "to dig and sowWe come to work the land in common and to make the waste ground growThis earth divided we will make wholeSo it can be a common treasury for all The sin of property we do disdainNo man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gainBy theft and murder they steal the landNow everywhere the walls rise up at their command.

9. The Diggers They make the laws to chain us wellThe clergy dazzle us with heaven or they damn us into hellWe will not worship the god they serveThey god of greed who feeds the rich while poor folk starve We work, we eat together, we need no swordsWe will not bow to the masters or pay rent to the lordsStill we are free men though we are poorYou Diggers all, stand up for glory, stand up now" From the men of property the order cameThey sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the Diggers' claimTear down their cottages, destroy their cornThey were dispersed, but still the vision carries on You poor, take courage, you rich, take careThis earth was made a common treasury for everyone to shareAll things in common, all people oneWe come in peace, [but] the order came to cut them down.

10. Chapter 12 • Marx was on the revolutionary end of the spectrum. Noting the enormous growth of what he called the ‘proletariat,’ he prophesied that the working class, growing ever more miserable, would rise up and overthrow capitalism and take over the means of production. As noted, Marxist socialism/ communism was only one of the social movements that arose to oppose capitalism. • Another movement, that is still highly relevant today, is the co-operative movement.

11. Chapter 12 • It originated in Great Britain largely under the influence of one-time factory manager and socialist, Robert Owen. • He envisioned factories owned and managed co-operatively by the workers who worked in them. Source: http://www.toqonline.com/blog/robert-owen/

12. Chapter 12 • By 1994, one-half of the world’s population was involved in co-ops in some way – either workers’ or consumers’ co-ops (see Table 12.1 and the figures on pp. 266-267). Have any of you been members of either? • One particularly interesting example is that of the Mondragon co-ops in the Basque region of Spain. Founded in 1941 by Father Arizmend-ierrietaunder the nose of Franco. Today, there 30,000 worker-owners in 100 industrial, service, retail and banking co-ops. The father was influenced by Owen and by the Spanish anarchists.

13. Chapter 12 • Another example is the marvellously networked co-ops of the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. • Of course, co-ops face the same competitive pressures as corporations and this can warp their original intentions. • Co-ops are an example of the reformist side of the spectrum of opposition to the economic status quo; the tension between reform and revolution has persisted, though the latter has mostly ceased to be an option in the developed countries.

14. Chapter 12 • Between 1917 and 1989, it seemed that a viable alternative to capitalism of sorts existed in the Soviet bloc and Communist China. However, the authors are in error when they describe Eastern European nations as having also undergone “successful revolutions.” In fact, what occurred there was a combination of military occupation and coup d’etats. • In all of these countries, enormous economic and social inequalities remained, and where greater equality was achieved it was at an enormous political cost in repression and bloodshed.

15. Chapter 12 • Estimates of intended and unintended deaths in the Soviet Union range as high as 62 million and, in China, as high as 77 million. Both regimes also wreaked havoc on the environment. • Beginning with the rule of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the U.S., and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, it seemed that capitalism was finally triumphant. As Thatcher said at the time: “there is no alternative” to neo-liberal capitalism. • However, since the late 1990s, the counter-globalization and other movements have picked up steam.

16. Chapter 12 • One manifestation of this are the annual World Social Forums which, in their 2006 Mali meeting, produced the Bamako Accord (see Table 12.2). • While capitalism has a tendency to co-opt and assimilate alternative economic practices, it can also co-exist with them and vice-versa. • Gibson-Graham describe what they call “a zone of cohabitation and contestation among multiple economic forms” (see the Iceberg Model – Figure 12.2 on p. 270).

18. Chapter 12 • They argue that, globally, 30-50% of all economic activity is not capitalist. They give the example of daycare (Figure 12.3) as an example of the intertwining of capitalist and non-capitalist forms of service delivery. • They talk about a community (or what others have called a social) economy, where ethical principles govern and enterprises are owned by the community. • Moreover, some capitalist economies are more regulated and managed than others, and geared towards a longer-term perspect-ive– for instance, Germany, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries.

19. The ‘Whole Economy’ • Peter Ross and David Usher in their book From the Roots Up: Economic Development As If the Community Mattered offer up a useful way of dividing up the social economy. • They divide the economy into two main sectors: formal and informal. • The formal sector consists of big business and the public sector. The informal sector consists of seven sub-sectors: • small business enterprises • collective and cooperative enterprises • community organizations and enterprises • voluntary activity • barter and skills exchanges • mutual aid, and • household activity.

22. The Whole Economy • What distinguishes the two major sectors is: the rationale for economic activity and scale. • The rationale for the formal economy is profit maximization and/or advancing the political goals of the state, which sometimes coincide closely with the objectives of the corporate sector. • The rationale in the informal sector (and also the mixed) is serving the needs of producers, consumers, communities, and also (in some cases) nature. • While the scale of the formal economy is massive, the scale of informal sector organizations is often quite small, with some organizations like VanCity straddling the line. • Going back to the list of sectors, which of these have been involved in fulfilling your needs over the past month?

23. Chapter 12 • The authors of the text give as an example of alternative economic practices the LETS system, which they claim was first introduced in the UK in 1985. Others claim it actually originated in the Comox Valley. • It does not require money, except possibly a membership fee. All services are counted in hours, and people build up their spending power (for other goods and services) through the services they render for other people, which are recorded through a centralized computer. It also builds social networks. • In addition, jurisdictions like Ithaca, NY and Salt Spring also have community currencies.

24. Chapter 12 • They give Argentina during the crisis of 2001-2002 as an example of the highly effective use of a LETS-type system. However, it declined once the economy resumed its normal functioning (see Figure 12.3). • LETS systems are sometimes seen as “lifeboat” structures that help people over bad patches and then fade in significance. • The other institution they look at is credit unions, which started in Germany in the 1850s and then spread. In Canada, they started with the caissepopulairein Quebec.

25. Chapter 12 • Van City is the largest credit union in BC, with $16 billion in assets and nearly 500,000 member-owners. It is controlled by the membership and donates extensively to community projects.

26. Chapter 12 • Drawing on the work of sociologist Andrew Sayer, the authors introduce the notion of the moral economy. • They note that it has been enunciated by a wide array of writers and thinkers: Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, Polanyi, and the UN (“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control” (Declaration of Human Rights, 1948).

27. Chapter 12 • One example of a moral economy is the ethical investment movement, of which VanCityhas beena leader. VIUFA is currently trying to force the BC Investment Management Corporation to get divest themselves of a bunch of shitty stocks in our portfolio. • Another example is the fair trade movement. The Fair Trade Initiative says “Our mission is to connect disadvantaged producers and consumers, promote fairer trading conditions and empower producers to combat poverty, strengthen their position and take more control over their lives.”

28. Chapter 12 • The fair trade movement renders the social relations embedded in commodities more transparent and responsible. • As seen in Figure 12.5, the fair trade movement has grown by leaps and bounds, growing 15% between 2008 and 2009 alone to $3.4 billion in products. Even the corporations are jumping on the bandwagon. • There is now a Fair Trade Towns movement (see Box 12.5), along with the Livable Wage community movement we mentioned a couple of weeks ago. • See Table 12.5 for a comparison between the mainstream global economy and the moral or alternative global economy.

29. Questions For You • Given what you know about alternative economic institutions, which ones do you think are best at • meeting the needs of consumers and producers; • reducing social and economic inequalities; • reducing ecological damage/ embracing sustainability; • being financially viable, • and involving more than just a few people?