Page 141 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

relationships discussed above. What is envisaged is ‘a planetary system
of economies made up of locally owned enterprises accountable to all
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their stakeholders’. How realistic this or any of the other arrangements
would be is another matter, to which we shall now turn.

Feasibility

I will now turn to the discussion of the general feasibility of the alter-
native proposals and how this feasibility could be enhanced, if possible.
The first issue that confronts us in this proposal for a community econ-
omy is that of the relationship between size, the growth of the division
of labor, and trade. The proposals contained in the IFG documents
assume that size can be reduced and trade curtailed to local trade with-
out any significant repercussions in the standard of living of the com-
munity and in the overall well-being of a nation. The thinking is not that
there will be no repercussions at all but that these will not be drastic.
They will be confined to superfluous aspects of consumerism without
significantly affecting what people really need and want to produce and
consume. If such reductions occur, then they would be a good thing
because this in turn would reduce resource consumption and help to
protect the environment, especially from the pollution by motor vehicles
and from excessive consumer waste. Apart from this kind of reduction
in consumption, it is fair to say that IFG does not anticipate a huge
reduction in the standard of living of communities in the developed
world.
They could hardly do so because they clearly assume that substantial
funds will be available for research, for spending on environmental pro-
tection, public health and social welfare as well as substantial sums
available to finance the cancellation of Third World debt and to provide
generous development assistance to the needy in Africa, Asia and Latin
America. In other words, all this assumes a highly productive economy
generating a substantial surplus, leaving enough for re-investment and
generous public programs. This surplus would have to be generated
somewhere and the question would then have to be, given an economy
of small and medium-sized community enterprises, how would such a
substantial surplus be generated?
But this issue of how a social surplus would be generated is, in the
final analysis, a secondary question. The more important issue is the
vision of a community economy ‘of the classic liberal sort’ made up
entirely of small and medium-sized firms serving the local community.

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