Page 143 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

economies of scope and scale put forward first by Alfred Marshall and
more recently by Michael Porter.
If this is the case, it means that any attempt to reduce long-distance
trade to a prescribed minimum would not only be a matter of restricting
the operations of transnational corporations as the IFG group seems to
imagine. It would just as much require action against the operations
of the very small and medium-sized business that they are championing.
I set aside for later the discussion of who would determine what level of
trade is allowed, in what goods and services (there are millions of them –
inputs, inputs to inputs, inputs to inputs to inputs, and so forth) in which
firms; and what method could conceivably be devised to manage all of
this, even at the community level. How small would one have to be not
to qualify as a transnational corporation and who would establish and
police this ‘maximum’? We shall come to these issues later.
For the moment, let us simply note that it would be necessary not only
to re-orient transnational corporations. They would also have to be a rad-
ical disruption in the operations of the most profitable and efficient small
and medium-sized business – often the ones which are environmentally
most friendly and who are most likely to support groups such as IFG at
the moment! Again, such a program is fraught with dire political impli-
cations, as the experience of Léon Blum in France and Allende in Chile
teaches us.
For the existing supply lines of these small and medium-sized business
would have to go. Their markets would have to change. They would be
required by some form of export controls and quantitative restrictions to
use local raw materials, equipment, services and labor, irrespective of the
efficiency gains or losses. This is, after all, an alternative that claims to
put ‘life’ before ‘money’ and to put the ‘democracy of people’ before the
‘democracy of money’ – all of which are highly questionable oppositions
within the materialist tradition. What then would happen to their costs?
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Could they even break even, much less make a profit? Could they con-
tinue to operate at all? What then would happen to the people currently
employed by them? What would happen to the genuinely local small
business services (the local corner shop) that depended on demand from
these ‘long-distance’ small business for their markets? What then would
happen to the local standard of living? What would happen to the ‘local
culture’ and ‘economic democracy’, not to mention ‘political democ-
racy’? The matter of the relationship between size and international trade
is hardly as simple as the anti-globalization movement tends to present it.
Let us assume that this radical re-orientation not only of large
corporations (many would have to be closed) but also of small and

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