The Localist Manifesto
section 1
the new hard times
Hard times used to mean that you did not have enough money to keep yourself and your family safe, fed, and reasonably happy. When you found yourself in such a situation, you could vow to work harder and spend less, you could join with others in a movement of some kind to improve your lot, or you could say to hell with it and go fishing. As long as the economy was chugging along, any of these strategies would work well enough.
Like everything else, hard times have gotten complicated. The economy now moves in fits and starts – no more chugging – and when wealth is being generated most of it ends up in the bank accounts of people who are wealthy enough already. This is not something that anybody is going to fix. The widespread affluence of the 1945-1975 period is not returning – the conditions that made it possible have evaporated. Politicians will say that they have a plan for restoring general prosperity, but they are lying. They know it and we know it. American politics these days looks like a shell game because it is a shell game: various illusions are shuffled around in front of us by people we have no reason to trust and we play along, praying like gamblers that one of them will magically come true and change our fortunes.
On top of all that, the state of the economy is no longer the only, or even the most important, determinant of people’s prospects. Hard times are no longer just an economic condition. We now have to reckon with the degradation of our water and food supply, the destruction of soil and woodlands, the poisoning of the air and the seas, the onset of inhospitable weather. These are not distant concerns but issues that directly impact our well-being. These problems came with the affluence: they are as integral to the postwar lifestyle as interstate highways and cheap hamburgers. They cannot be addressed without making changes in the way we live from day to day. The institutions that created the postwar order – big banks, big corporations, the regulatory and security agencies of the government – are not going to make those changes. They are dealing with the new situation by stonewalling, closing ranks, and mouthing empty words of concern as conditions worsen. Mainly, they trust that we will keep buying their false promises of renewed affluence.
So we are on our own. There is no help coming from the citadels of wealth and power. Further, all the old protest strategies and storied visions of reform and revolution are long obsolete – they are as nostalgic for a dead past as the fantasies of eternal abundance spun by the rich and powerful. The authority to make decisions regarding land and resources, regarding how we might live and what kind of work we might undertake, must be wrested from the people who wield it now. But that seizure of power must be different from any that has yet been tried. We need to take over, but in a manner that shuns the “isms” that made such a wreck of the previous century.
The new hard times demand that we devise a plan at once immediately practical and boldly visionary – something in touch at the outset with existing forms of political engagement but in communication as well with a future we can only enter by breaking decisively with what current ways of thinking prescribe as reasonable or possible. We need – urgently – a politics pitched beyond the outdated Right/Left divide to those who fear the future now looming and know in their hearts that none of the big institutions currently in the saddle, private or public, are capable of changing course.
Occupy the Hearth 