Page 146 - Culture Society and Economy

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‘LOCALIZATION’ EXPLORED

on to seize Jamaica from the Spanish Crown and develop plantations and
20
the slave trade after 1655. This was ‘long-distance trade’ with a vengeance
and God’s Englishman needed precious little egging. The deep embed-
dedness of London in international finance and politics is thousands of
times greater today. Cut away this trade and the London which we
currently know, and which anti-globalizers seem to think will simply suffer
a little tinkering here and there, will cease to exist. No more Whitehall.
No more City. No more Oxford Street. No more West End theatre. No more
Brixton either.
The same is the case for the economy called ‘Britain’. This is after all
your original ‘long-distance’ trading economy, perhaps going back to
Roman times. And one must not forget Amsterdam and Antwerp and the
smug Dutch and Belgian bourgeoisie. Where would those economies and
those cities be without ‘long-distance’ trade? I will not even bother to
mention cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, São Paulo
and Mexico City. Nor would there be any economy to unite with in any
‘European Union’ if long-distance trade was curtailed. The localizers can-
not have their cake and eat it. If one says ‘community economy’, one can-
not at the same time assume the persistence of a strong national economy
and of powerful regional economic blocs. These blocs are expressions of
the fact that the economy is no longer ‘local’. It would be more consistent
to propose the dismantling of the nation and of the region and the estab-
lishment of an ‘anthropologically’ restricted exchange and periodic market,
linking essentially autarkic local economic communities. This is what
anthropologists who are also anti-globalizers, such as Graeber, could be
interpreted as proposing. 21
Economies ceased to be ‘local’ thousands of years ago, long before the
emergence of capitalism. The very existence of the national economy and
the formation of the nation politically and culturally is an expression of the
fact that ‘self-sustaining’ local economies no longer exist, if they ever did.
It would not therefore be a matter of ‘going back’ to some non-existent
liberal golden age as seems to be imagined. It would be a matter of ‘going
forward’ to something not existing in human history for thousands of
years. Dismantle the economic ties which constitute the national and
regional economy and you dismantle the nation and the region. The same
of course applies to the global economy. I leave it to the reader to judge
the feasibility of such ideas.
Big corporations arise out of the growth of the division of labor,
which is what leads to the extent and spread of market relations. Adam
Smith made this elementary point in 1776. Hegel took it up and devel-
oped it in 1816. 22 Pace Smith, Hegel pointed out that civil society was

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