The Localist Manifesto
section 10
wealth, equality, and fairness
The argument that we should reconvert real estate into land and then resettle that land in a manner that allows direct democracy, ecological wisdom, and local commerce to thrive will also require, if it is to be persuasive, a rethinking of what we mean by wealth. For many in the 99%, the only wealth they have been able to accumulate over a lifetime resides in the value of their homes. Why should they support an idea that, if put into practice, would result in the immediate evaporation of homeowner equity? What will happen to their retirement and travel plans, not to mention their desire to leave something behind to ease their children’s access to a life of relative comfort?
To take the sting out of such worries, one need only tally up the costs and benefits of conceiving wealth in personal terms and then hitching our prospects for acquiring it to something so impersonal as a market in real estate. On the positive side, this arrangement gives people of modest means qualified access to unearned income. That income provides security in the latter stage of life and, when handed down, welcome assistance for children in early adulthood. On the negative side, these benefits bring with them a complex of fantasies about belonging to that charmed group – the owners of banks and corporations – whose access to unearned income knows no limits. Those fantasies then become a key determinant of our tastes and preferences in everything from clothing and vehicles to news outlets and political parties. The messages transmitted conjointly by mass culture and corporate politics create a fog of forgetfulness, making it nearly impossible for those settled comfortably within it to recall that, unlike those in the 1%, we have to work awfully hard to acquire our castles. The fantasies associated with home ownership must be grandiose to compensate the monumental sacrifices necessary – of time and energy in every instance, of pride and self-respect when one’s job amounts to doing one kind of corporate shitwork or another – to keep up with the payments over the course of adulthood. All the interest, of course, goes to the banks – a highly lucrative form of extortion that we celebrate as a progressive achievement. Having submitted cheerfully to it in that form, we now see the extortion model applied to higher education, as most young people can only get the training and knowledge needed to enter a trade or profession after contributing their pound of flesh to the banks. Well before they have put their signature on a mortgage contract, these unfortunates have anted up tens of thousands of dollars to a lending institution just to get themselves in the game of home ownership. We have started to kick against the idea of student debt but still accept homeowner debt as part of some natural order of things. But the villains are the same in each case – a handful of supersized banks and our seeming inability to imagine that we might educate and shelter ourselves without their assistance.
A long time ago, the practice of loaning money at interest was condemned out of hand. Usury, as they called it, was immoral on principle. Ethical standards such as these placed obstacles in the path of those Europeans whose greed for riches was put into overdrive by the conquest of land, people, and markets in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. That greed was fabulously rewarded, so any notions of fair dealing that might seek to restrain it were quietly reclassified as quaint superstitions. A form of thievery thereby found new life as standard business practice, which is why we don’t think twice as we indenture ourselves for decades to the filthy rich in order to acquire an education or a home. Anti-usury sentiments are not dead – we still feel uneasy about charging interest on money loaned to family members or close friends. But we allow ourselves to be fleeced by strangers in big glassy buildings because we have internalized the usurer’s definition of wealth. The praise we bestow upon a system that allows us to collect our pittance of unearned income when we are often too worn out to enjoy it is like the gratitude a simpleton might feel for a thief who has just robbed him of everything he owned but, out of kindness of course, lets him keep his shoes.
Wealth, like democracy, is a social creation. Just as individual freedom is best secured through direct participation in a self-governing locality, familial prosperity is most effectively guaranteed through active membership in a well-functioning community. The wealth of a neighborhood pried loose from the grip of the real estate industry is not subject to the fluctuations of the market. It cannot be stolen by the next gang of frat boy MBAs who devise a way to manipulate that market so that wealth flows from your pockets into theirs. Especially at this moment, as the gossamer webs of global commerce snap under the weight of rampaging social inequality, political instability, and ecological imbalance, local well-being suddenly stands revealed as our most reliable form of wealth. What good is a paid off house when everything is falling down around your ears? Drought, fires, storms of unprecedented intensity; social unrest, quick-trigger violence, the stench of party politics; oil spills, soil depletion, the steady fouling of air and water … make your own list and give it a hard stare. The items on that list – not the house, not the stock market assets, not the insurance money – are the things that our children believe to be their truest inheritance. That is what they feel we have left them and how they know we have failed them. Members of this generation now speak in earnest among themselves about whether the act of bringing children of their own into the world can be defended on moral grounds.
These conversations represent perhaps the most damning indictment of our current situation. They also comprise a harsh judgment of those – the “greatest” generation and the boomers – who allowed a situation to develop where young people can find near at hand so many compelling reasons to opt out of childrearing. To be sure, members of these generations can be credited with many good and noble deeds. Today’s parents and grandparents failed their children and grandchildren so miserably not because they are bad or dishonorable people but because they trusted so unconditionally a flawed vision of progress. In their eagerness to gain entry into a consumer’s paradise, they turned over all decision-making authority to people for whom the only wealth that mattered was the kind generated by an ever-expanding consumer economy. Automobile manufacturers, oil and chemical companies, insurance and real estate companies, banks and Wall Street firms – these are the institutions we entrusted with the task of creating the good life. The folly of placing the future in the hands of those who, as a matter of course, only cared about making money might have been hard to see in the first few decades after World War II, but it should be impossible to overlook now.
The elders within the 99% surely sacrificed, in war and peace. Look around you, however, and see if it makes any sense to say that the rewards reached the people for whom those sacrifices were made. No, the 1% used the authority we handed over to them after the war to siphon off the lion’s share of those rewards and then used that bounty to further tighten their grip on the levers of money- and decision-making. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but it was mainly for them that the “greatest” and the boomers sacrificed. The intended beneficiaries – their children and grandchildren – have inherited instead the grim realities of the new hard times. Had the sacrifices made to accumulate personal wealth been made to maintain the well-being of neighborhoods and ecosystems, we would not now be facing such a relentless cascade of seemingly unmanageable crises. If there is to be any redemption for such a tragic failure of vision, it will be of the sort that Robin 99 offers.
The ever-widening gap between the 1% and everybody else is only the most consequential kind of inequality the must be remedied. Other varieties exist within the ranks of the 99% and these too are experienced daily and felt deeply. Localists do not propose to eliminate these disparities right away in one fell swoop. Doing that would require that we deploy all the instruments of coercion – hyper-centralized and undemocratic from the outset, punitive and arbitrary soon enough – that figured so prominently in prior revolutions fought in the name of social equality. Our means of handling inequality within our own ranks must match the ends to which our movement aspires: as decision-makers in communities small enough to allow for all voices to be heard, we will figure out together how to make sure that everyone is sheltered and provisioned in a way that guarantees comfort for all residents and brings honor to the community. Those discussions will go on in the assemblies but also in all the common spaces where neighbors might meet up and share stories and complaints. As these spaces proliferate, the spirit of taking care and taking responsibility can expand to fill them. Values that we try to model in our families – kindness, empathy, loyalty, fairness – will find a purchase in our neighborhoods. Persisting inequalities, in such a setting, are not abstract concerns that we learn to live with but intolerable affronts to the dignity of people with whom we live, work, and socialize.
On Occupy the Hearth Day, for example, some will acquire deeds to nice homes, some to substandard houses and apartments, some to no homes at all. But we will tackle these inequalities in a situation where solutions can readily be conceived and executed. Wealth that once had to be paid out for mortgages or rent will now be available for local projects. People no longer tethered by necessity to the joyless grind of the nine-to-five job can experience the satisfaction that comes from contributing labor, thought, and good will to undertakings in their own neighborhood. Institutions will now be in place – a directly democratic local assembly, working groups devoted to housing equity – that can gather information about housing needs, set priorities based on those needs, and then assemble the labor and materials necessary to make needed improvements. The ethic of voluntarism that once inspired neighbors to cooperate in harvesting crops and raising barns can again become an animating force in day-to-day activities and transactions. Young people itching to leave their birth households will find opportunities commensurate with their (small) income and their (strong) longings – cooperative living arrangements in cities and the countryside, ease of movement from worksite to worksite and hangout to hangout, chances to learn different disciplines and crafts, the unbridled pursuit of enlightenment and adventure. People of all ages can get busy creating new living and sheltering arrangements out of the structures and materials that will become available with the demolition of the real estate industry and whatever absentee-owned corporate entities that will topple along with it.
Along with the campaign festivals and neighborhood markets, the projects undertaken by local institutions to repair and upgrade the housing stock will serve as powerful crucibles of social solidarity. As we build and fix things together, share food and drink, and set our feet to dancing and our lungs to singing when work is done, people of every color, gender, and creed encounter in its most palpable form the plain reality of our common humanity. That reality will find embodiment in all that we design and build. Just as the evident fact of poverty and residential segregation reinforces the prejudice that plagues us now, the etching of fairness and good will into the visible features of our dwellings and settlement patterns undermines the very foundations of prejudice. The change in consciousness that must come if hate and ignorance are ever to be diminished begins with a willingness to rethink what all the existing authorities would have you take for granted. As land re-settlers wielding authority within our own localities, we will be involved daily and practically in just such a rethinking. No longer hemmed in at every turn by the fixed parameters of profitability, we can weave common sense standards of fair dealing back into the texture of our lives together.
Equality and fairness, it turns out, are very different kinds of ideals. Equality emerged as a battle cry in revolutions against those – monarchs and their landowning mainstays – who presumed that their possession of authority and riches well beyond that of a commoner or peasant was part and parcel of a god-given natural order. It was presumed by those who raised this cry that a republic was the kind of society within which the power of hereditary rulers and landed aristocrats might finally be broken and ordinary folk might participate as equals in an open economy and a democratic government. As we know all too well now, that is not how things turned out. It was in defense of equality that heads were lopped off in revolutionary France. Equality was to be the hallmark of the classless society which Marxists emblazoned on their banner, but in the effort to achieve it they built some of the most repressive social systems on record. The ideal of equality is woven into the fabric of American constitutionalism, where it once coexisted amicably with chattel slavery and now adorns one of the most unequal societies on record.
It would appear foolhardy indeed, in light of these historical examples, to continue to fight under the banner of equality. Yet we are still at it. The literature of reform and protest is littered with phrases like “equality of opportunity” and “equality before the law,” as if these have ever existed or are likely to exist at some point in the future in a society such as ours. The language of equality is yet another tool in the hands of the wealthy. The idea is a carrot dangled before those hungry for justice by people who will use every stick in their arsenal – the courts and the cops, the legislative and the executive branches, the media – to prevent such an ideal from ever being realized. We fight gallantly for “equal rights” of one sort or another but rarely evaluate with clear eyes what we might gain by such struggles. If we did, we might have to acknowledge that the real thing – the substance rather than the promise – can never be found among the fruits of victory. When the smoke clears, the only equality we are ever granted is an equal right to skulk into a voting booth every four years and vote for someone who, once in office, will slavishly serve the makers and beneficiaries of inequality. By participating in this charade, we lay claim to our right to be hoodwinked democratically but forfeit our right to protect the well-being of our land base, our communities, and our families. That is the right for which we, as localists, must fight if we are to stand any chance of salvaging the well-being of our planet.
Should we listen more carefully to our own conversations than to the blather emanating from the centers of power, we would find that most people are more apt to demand fairness than equality. Phrases like “that seems fair” or “fair enough,” followed perhaps by a handshake, supply the most satisfactory endpoints to the kinds of negotiations in which we most commonly engage. To respond favorably to those words is to acknowledge the existence of ethical standards and behavioral guardrails sturdy enough to settle disagreements and underwrite common endeavors. Those standards and guardrails only operate at the local level. They can only be integrated into the workings of interactions that, because they are face-to-face, afford empathy and trust some leverage in decision-making. The prosperity of the jobs/growth behemoth is predicated upon the destruction of any such ethical principles and the enshrinement of profit (for the 1%, of course) as the sole arbiter of important decisions. The 99% are permitted to knock themselves out competing for equality because the people who wrote the rules of the game know, by reason of the principles they swear by, that fairness is absolutely off the table.
Occupy the Hearth 