Page 136 - Culture Society and Economy

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‘LOCALIZATION’ EXPLORED

This is the line of thinking that leads to the attempt to propose the
breaking up of the contemporary economy made up of large-scale
transnational corporations engaging in global trade. This would be con-
verted into a small-scale community-focused economy in which what is
called ‘long-distance trade’ would be confined to a limited set of goods
and services and would be carefully controlled.
Such a local economy would try to produce as much as possible for
itself from its own resources and would trade mainly locally, except in
exceptional cases such as the trading of necessarily large-scale energy
supplies. This is called the ‘site-here-to-sell-here’ policy. This local-
ization of production would also be a localization of consumption. It
would therefore get rid of the requirement to ship goods and services
over long distances around the world which is undoubtedly one of the
main sources of environmental damage in the world today. One result
of this, it is argued, would be greater respect for the environment, as it
would now be in the clear and obvious interest of the local community
to husband its resources. It would also lead to a reduction in excess con-
sumption, especially of luxuries and exotic products. This is because
such trade would either be banned outright or taxed at a prohibitive
level.
Credit and investment in such an economy would be provided by
local banks only and, indeed, there may even be the creation of local
currencies that circulate only within the community, side-by-side with
national currencies. Necessarily, the labor market policy would also be
controlled, with preference given to local labor and with barriers
erected to discourage immigrant labor. Labor would have the right to
move from one community to another only in exceptional circum-
stances. In general, a taxation and regulatory policy would be pursued
which over time would lead to the break-up of large corporations and
their conversion into small and medium-sized business which operated
at the local level. Likewise, such policies would inhibit the growth of
large corporations in a deliberate move to maintain the ‘human scale’
of the economy.
In fairness, it should be pointed out that it would not be strictly accu-
rate to characterize these ideas as a proposal for autarky, familiar to
aficionados of world systems theory from the 1970s. Although without
doubt influenced by this body of ideas, this is not a program to ‘de-link’
from the global economy, as it was fondly called. This is so for a number
of reasons that are important to understand.
In the first place, although the IFG group is hostile to what it calls
‘long-distance trade’, it recognizes that some of this is necessary for a

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